New Books Network

Starting in the late 1970s, three women navigate post Cultural Revolution China: Lulu, who’s forced to become a prostitute in Shanghai to save her mother and sister from starving, Lei who is sold in marriage for cigarettes and a few eggs, and Yan, Lei’s smart, beautiful daughter, whose kindness to the farmer master’s neurodivergent son allows her to get an education. Both Lei and Lulu must put aside their dreams and suffer indignity after indignity, Lei from her husband, and Lulu from her pimp, while Yan ultimately sacrifices her career to help her family. With a cast of unforgettable characters struggling through China’s transition to modernity, and grappling with the impact of mental illness, prostitution, and Aids, And the Ancestors Sing is a stunning gripping historical novel.

Radha Lin Chaddah was born in London to an East Indian father and a Malaysian Chinese mother, and grew up in Kenya, the UK and the US, graduating from New Trier High School in Winnetka, IL. She majored in Biology at the University of Chicago, earned medical and law degrees at the University of Illinois, and a Master of Public Health at Harvard University. She completed Internal Medicine residency training, and later practiced, at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston. Radha and her family moved, over the course of twenty years, from Boston to NYC to Taipei to Shanghai to Beijing to Princeton, and finally to Philadelphia. Radha worked as a primary care physician in Boston, NYC and Beijing; worked with the China CDC to co-write the book, HIV/ AIDS: Beyond the Numbers; and provided mental healthcare to patients in several states as a telemedicine doctor upon settling in Philadelphia. When not reading and writing, Radha enjoys learning new Mandarin characters, tackling novice knitting projects, painting with watercolors and acrylics, catching a live, stand-up comedy show with her husband, Avery, trying out new recipes with their young adult daughters, Yani and Ayo, and, of course, jotting down story notes for her next writing project. You can visit Radha online at radhalinchaddah.com.
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Many people think they know what fairies are, what a fairy looks like, and how a fairy is expected to behave. Dr. Francis Young's Fairies: A History (Polity, 2026) demonstrates that the truth about belief in fairies is far stranger than clichéd images of tiny figures with wings and wands.Before the rise of the 'small winged fairy' in the nineteenth century, the category of fairies included a vast range of supernatural human-like creatures, from the elves of Scandinavia and the aos sí of Ireland to the vilas of the Balkans and the fadas of Iberia. Dr. Young traces the ancient origins of belief in such creatures and how it adapted to the rise of Christianity and then flourished in medieval Europe, before being transformed – but not destroyed – by the upheavals of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and even European colonial expansion, which made fairies a global phenomenon. He concludes this uniquely wide-ranging history by reflecting on the surprising ways in which fairy belief endures in our apparently disenchanted contemporary world.No one who reads this brilliant tour through the enchanted pathways of fairyland will ever look at the winged creatures of contemporary popular culture – or the woods at the bottom of their garden – in the same way again.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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For nearly a century, every Democratic president—and many Republicans—entered office promising to restructure America’s health care system. Barack Obama finally broke through but, in the process, opened a tumultuous decade in which battles over health care dominated American politics. In Whiplash: From the Battle for Obamacare to the War on Science (Yale University Press, 2026), Dr. David Blumenthal and Dr. James A. Morone go behind the scenes to describe how three very different presidents—pursuing very different goals—maneuvered through the fraught politics of health care.President Obama ended the century-long quest for reform but ignited a screaming culture war that blazed into the Trump administration and blew up during the COVID epidemic. President Trump, facing the greatest health crisis in a century, denied and dithered. Then he directed a medical triumph in Operation Warp Speed. He and President Biden, facing the pandemic’s devastation, mounted the most successful anti-poverty program in eighty years. But in the tumult, Trump launched a shattering new political war, not over coverage but over science itself.Authoritative and gripping, this book describes the remarkable achievements of these years while also showing how respect for science clashed with scorn toward the deep state and left the nation unprepared for the next health crisis.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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It is no secret that marriage rates in the United States are at an all-time low. Despite this significant decline, the institution of marriage endures in our society amid historic changes to its meaning and practice. How does the continuing strength of marriage impact the relationships of same-sex couples after the legalization of same-sex marriage?

Drawing on over one hundred interviews with LGBTQ+ people, Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same-Sex Relationships (University of Chicago Press, 2024) reveals the transformative impact marriage equality has had on same-sex relationships. Sociologist Dr. Abigail Ocobock looks to same-sex couples across a wide age range to illuminate the complex ways institutional mechanisms work in tandem to govern the choices and behaviors of individuals with different marriage experiences. Dr. Ocobock examines both the influence of marriage on the dynamics of same-sex relationships and how LGBTQ+ people challenge heteronormative assumptions about marriage, highlighting the complex interplay between institutional constraint and individual agency.

Marriage Material presents a bold challenge to dominant scholarly and popular ideas about the decline of marriage, making clear that gaining access to legal marriage has transformed same-sex relationships, both for better and for worse.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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In Free Enough to Grow: The Turkish Protestant Movement, 1961-2016 (Springer Nature, 2026), James Bultema identifies and investigates four central factors that gave rise to the Turkish Protestant movement in the latter half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. Drawing on qualitative interviews and historical studies the book explores the complex interplay of religious freedom, missionary activity, interdependent choice, and multilevel plausibility structures. An imperfect but sufficient religious freedom created the soil for the growth of mostly tiny Turkish Protestant churches that were countercultural and vulnerable, but also vitally interconnected. This work provides an extensive mission history of the Turkish Protestant movement.

The book is part of the Springer series Boundaries of Religious Freedom: Regulating Religion in Diverse Societies and was awarded the Science Award on Religious Freedom 2026 the Freie Theologische Hochschule (FTH) Gießen, Germany.
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