Myth and folklore, the rippling fabric of time, and the immutable nature of love bridge the nearly limitless distance between two pairs of sisters in the elaborate, dreamlike fantasy novel Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta (The Liar's Weave).
Sisters Laleh and Myung live within the whale of babel, a vast "baby universe" filled with chambers the size of galaxies. They have met only each other, but curious Myung believes other people exist. Laleh, content to live in the whale and tell stories of their creator, is heartbroken when Myung leaves. Years later, Laleh travels through a dream and finds Myung on a sentient island populated by a living keeper and her ancestors' ghosts. "What appears story-less is only unknown," and the origin of the whale, the sentient island, and a metaphysical museum slowly come to light through the story of two more women, lost to the centuries: another set of sisters who reshaped space and time and were torn from each other along the way.
Mehta's ambitious, sprawling fantasy will invite comparisons to Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, not only because its settings are vast, unmapped rambles of wonder and danger but also for the author's clarity of voice and ability to evoke a precise emotional mood. Fans of Erin Morgenstern's The Starless Sea will also enjoy the nesting-doll effect of the stories within stories. This mad, magnificent trip through other worlds has an unhurried, indulgent quality that invites surrender to the experience. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads