* How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder

By Nina McConigley

COMING OF AGE

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder (Pantheon, $26, 9780593702246) is a powerhouse. It's a bracing story of abuse and protection bolstered by virtuosic writing that is simultaneously spare and poetic, subtle and brutal.

At the center of this striking literary debut are two Catholic schoolgirls, the daughters of an Indian mother and a white American father who works on oil rigs and is rarely home. It's the 1980s, and Georgie and Agatha are isolated and slightly adrift in their starkly white rural Wyoming town.

The girls chafe at how...