Harvey Freedenberg

The pain of long-held secrets and the lies necessary to preserve them are the subject of Bill Clegg’s intricately plotted second novel, The End of the Day. Narrated from six points of view, the novel spans the late 1960s to the present day for a group of characters disparate in social class but united by their connections to the circumstances by which one of them entered the world.

After newspaper journalist Hap Foster becomes a new father, his joy quickly turns to grief when the man he believes is his own father dies in an accidental fall. Christopher Foster’s sudden demise precipitates the unlocking of a vault concealing the trove of secrets that is the story of Hap’s birth and upbringing.

That story links three women: Dana Goss, an upper-class New Yorker whose family once inhabited an estate in rural Connecticut; Jackie, a working-class girl who was Dana’s close childhood friend before settling down to raise her family in the same small town; and Lupita Lopez, now living in Hawaii, who emigrated from Mexico as a 4-year-old and whose family has served Dana’s for many years.

The events that shadow the rest of their lives occur at a picnic on the night of July 4, 1969, a date Dana comes to think of as “the last day of what she would imprecisely call her youth, a period where her actions didn’t yet have consequences, or if they had, they hadn’t mattered very much.” Clegg discloses those consequences, and Dana’s flawed perception, at a measured pace, slipping smoothly from the life of one character to another and from present to past, revealing how entire lives have been marked indelibly by teenage impulses and mistakes. Though Lupita believes at one point that she is “safe from the truth,” The End of the Day explains with painful clarity why, in some lives, that can never be.

Alexandra Chang’s debut novel, Days of Distraction, offers a thoughtful reflection on gender, relationships and racial and ethnic identity in 21st-century America, as seen through the observant eyes of a young Chinese American woman.

Employed as a Consumer Technology Reporter for a San Francisco-based publication, Chang’s narrator Alexandra (Jing-Jing to her family) writes “about gadgets for people with money to spend.” Between her dissatisfaction with the emptiness of her job and the not-so-subtle discrimination against women working in the tech world, she’s ready for a change.

With her white boyfriend, identified only as “J,” Alexandra embarks on a cross-country drive from the West Coast to Ithaca, New York, where J will enter a Ph.D. program in biochemistry at Cornell. She abandons her writing for a part-time job with a “major social media company that shall not be named” that pays her $30 an hour to do nothing more than “keep an eye on tech news and upload stories into the app.”

Along the way, relying on an accumulation of narrative fragments that defines Chang’s style, Alexandra gradually begins to unearth stories about the lives of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. when they began to arrive in large numbers in the 19th century, especially the unsubtle prejudice against them that included bans on interracial marriage. Among the most interesting is the story of Yamei Kin, the first woman of Chinese descent educated at an American university (Cornell), who went on to carve out a distinguished career as a nutritionist. Kin’s marriage to a white man provokes Alexandra to ruminate on the challenges in her own interracial relationship, ones that transcend the ordinary tensions that accompany the young couple’s uprooting and relocation.

Days of Distraction is less noteworthy for its action or plot twists than it is for Alexandra’s precise, fresh insights into life in a country where people who look like her have ultimately thrived. But as the novel reveals, that eventual acceptance sometimes has a steep price.

In surveying Britain’s social history over more than a century through the interconnected lives of 12 characters, all of them black women (save for two exceptions), Bernardine Evaristo has set an ambitious agenda for herself. Both in substance and style, her vibrant novel Girl, Woman, Other, co-winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2019, achieves that goal with a striking gallery of the lives and loves, triumphs and heartbreaks of these dozen memorable human beings and the world they inhabit.

Bookended by the story of Amma Bonsu, a lesbian playwright whose drama, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, is making its debut at the National Theatre, Girl, Woman, Other follows each of Evaristo’s characters through independent, short-storylike sections, while subtly linking each portrait to provide depth and texture. Farmer or banking executive, schoolteacher or cleaning-business proprietor, the novel’s characters cut across many levels of British society, with a focus on a span of time from the Margaret Thatcher era to the days of Brexit.

Some of these women wrestle with questions of sexual identity, while others must deal with incidents of physical violence and emotional abuse. Whether it’s Shirley King, whose idealism has curdled into cynicism after a lifetime of teaching high school history, or her former student Carole Williams, who fights to rise in the male-dominated world of international finance, Evaristo never stumbles in her ability to portray these figures with empathy, honesty and, at times, sharp humor. In every case, she skillfully reveals their struggles to define what it means to live meaningfully as spouses, lovers, friends and simply good people.

One of the principal pleasures of Girl, Woman, Other is Evaristo’s energetic, at times playful style. Hers is a unique sort of prose that nods in the direction of poetry in both format and occasionally in content. She dispenses with the use of some conventions of punctuation without ever sacrificing readability. This exciting, often unsettling novel succeeds by respecting both the dignity of its subjects and the intelligence of its readers.