As the new year kicks off, we’re cracking open a novel and a short-story collection about the uses and abuses of history.

Nina McConigley (Pantheon, 224 pp., $26, January 2026) 

As the new year kicks off, we’re cracking open a novel and a short-story collection about the uses and abuses of history.

Nina McConigley (Pantheon, 224 pp., $26, January 2026) 

Conventional murder mysteries keep readers guessing until the end of the story. Not so in Nina McConigley’s debut novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, which begins with an admission of guilt by its narrator. In the summer of 1986, when Georgie Creel was 12, she and her sister killed their uncle. The novel unfurls as an extended mea culpa.

Georgie is the daughter of an American father and an Indian mother. She was born and raised in the fictional town of Marley, Wyoming, where her dad works on an oil rig. “It’s not the pretty Wyoming, the tourist Wyoming,” Georgie explains. In a state defined by cowboy culture, Georgie clarifies that she is “the other kind of Indian.” (Like her protagonist, McConigley grew up as a mixed-race Indian American in Wyoming.)

“Everything fell apart that year,” Georgie says of 1986. Amid an oil bust and the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, she and her older sister decide to kill their uncle by poisoning his drinks with antifreeze. Vinny Uncle, as he is called, immigrated from India and moved in with the family a few years prior and terrorized the two girls. He “dipped into our lives like a tea bag into the whiteness of a porcelain cup” and “muddied the water,” Georgie recalls.

For Georgie, Vinny’s murder in rural Wyoming is an extension of the colonial oppression that “[b]oth kinds” of Indians have endured over generations. She draws from........

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