Ian Schwartz

What happened to Nelson? For nearly all of At Night We Walk in Circles, Daniel Alarcón’s brooding new novel, the fate of this unworldly young actor is unknown. 

With dreams of his immigration to the United States dashed and his girlfriend living with another man, Nelson is drifting through his early 20s, haunting the cafes of his unnamed Latin American city, which is newly gentrified after years of war and poverty (think Bedford-Stuyvesant). 

Then he wins a place in the “guerrilla” theater troupe, Diciembre, which made a splash in the 1980s with its boldly subversive plays. The small troupe is leaving the city to tour the countryside, presenting a revival of its notorious show, The Idiot President, which proved so threatening to the former regime that its writer (and Nelson’s hero), Henry Nuñez, was thrown in prison.

The weeks of this life-changing tour are recreated by Alarcón’s obsessive young narrator, a man not all that different from Nelson himself. Through interviews with Nelson’s friends, acquaintances and people he saw or met along the way, Alarcón’s dogged investigator reveals the inexorable series of events and circumstances that brought Nelson to the brink, and shows how the past, present and future can never be separated. As the book nears an end and Nelson’s return to the city grows imminent, the mystery deepens until the surprising, sudden climax.

Alarcón, whose list of awards and accolades would need a page of their own, is the author of the story collection War by Candlelight and the novel Lost City Radio. He has been named one of the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” and has drawn comparisons to literary giants such as Steinbeck, Nabokov and García Márquez. A more contemporary, if facile, comparison can be made to Roberto Bolaño, the late Latin writer whose novels still seem to pop up. The investigative style of Alarcón’s book brings to mind parts of Bolaño’s classic—though flawed—breakout work, The Savage Detectives. 

A thick, fierce story of pathos and obsession, At Night We Walk in Circles is sure to be an important part of Alarcón’s growing oeuvre. At its best, it is impressively Shakespearean in its ultimate lesson: that even the calmest hearts contain a hurricane.

British author Ned Beauman follows up his award-winning debut, Boxer, Beetle, with a novel equally bizarre, original and satisfying.

The Teleportation Accident, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, is the story of set designer Egon Loeser. We meet Egon in early 1930s Berlin. Hitler is beginning his climb to power and the nation grows more bellicose by the day, but Egon is apolitical to the point of obtuseness. He is concerned solely with his pursuit of the sultry Adele Hitler (no relation), a young woman whose charms have been widely sampled—Egon being the exception.

Egon’s other obsession is Adriano Lavicini, a Renaissance set designer whose attempt to create a teleportation device for the stage resulted in a tragedy that may or may not have been abetted by the devil.

In his second novel, British author Ned Beauman takes the sort of risks that writers under 30 should take, but rarely do.

Egon searches fruitlessly for Adele in Paris and then Los Angeles, where he becomes a reluctant member of the expat German community. He also bumbles his way into a murder investigation at CalTech, where a secret weapon, an actual teleportation device, is under development.

Egon’s two great loves—Adele and himself—are the driving forces of the novel. Egon is weak, banal and so solipsistic he should be royalty. In his indifference to the world beyond him, he is a monster. It won’t take much reading before you realize that, given the choice, you’d prefer to eat dinner at Hannibal Lecter’s while Humbert Humbert babysits your teenage daughter than spend an evening in Egon’s insipid company. Yet it works because the author, a special talent, pulls it off with style and without apology.

The Cambridge-educated Beauman lives in Istanbul and is the owner of a wonderfully spare website. He takes the sort of risks that writers under 30 should take, but rarely do. In his two novels—the first dealt with bugs, eugenics, a weak, repressed homosexual and an utterly revolting young boxer—he has yet to introduce one character wholly worthy of admiration, a feat that makes his works simultaneously fascinating, repelling and totally worthwhile.

In his wry, winning novels, Inman Majors has written about the South’s shady businessmen, bent politicians and moderately dysfunctional families with the delicate grace of—well, a Southern gentleman. But in Love’s Winning Plays, the sixth-generation Tennessean gets so down and dirty it’d be no surprise if he got booted above the Mason-Dixon Line forever.

In this uncomplicated, acidly hilarious new novel, Majors (who comes from a football-playing family—his uncle is former UT coach Johnny Majors) gleefully skewers the sacrosanct Southern institution of college football. And not just any college football, but Southeastern Conference football. With both barrels, he lets loose on the venerable, holy SEC.

Raymond Love is a young, earnest, almost-coach on one of the conference’s powerful teams. His actual position is Off-the-Field-Graduate-Assistant, but he is vying with another student for the position of Coaching Graduate Assistant, a coveted ticket to the sidelines.

In an acidly hilarious new novel, Majors lets loose with both barrels on the venerable, holy SEC.

When head coach Von Driver asks him to go along on the Pigskin Cavalcade, Raymond hopes he’s moving closer to the coveted slot. The Cavalcade is a road trip through the towns of Tennessee where fat-cat boosters and appreciative fans alike mingle with their coaching gods. But his spirits fall when he learns his job is to babysit the unpredictable Coach Woody, one of Driver’s assistants.

If Raymond embodies youthful innocence, then Coach Woody is his polar opposite. He is also the driving force behind the book. An alcoholic, renegade football legend who loves both country and classical music, he relates to the outside world in football terms. “He’d outkicked his coverage with her for sure,” Woody says of an old rival whose wife is too attractive for her mate. Woody is also a man of rare integrity in a business with a noticeable dearth of it.

Over the course of the tumultuous journey, which is spiced up by alcohol, a beauty or two—including one Raymond joined a book club to get close to—and a hilariously fanatical blogger, Raymond and Woody become friends. But when it comes time for Raymond to decide just how badly he wants the coaching job, that friendship—and Raymond’s values—are put to the test.

Love’s Winning Plays is classic guy-lit—a fun, fast romp that may not break new ground but does offer genuine laughs on nearly every page.

Ghost stories, more than most other tales, are at heart love stories. At their core is the fact that someone, on this side or the other, just flat out refuses to let go.

In You Came Back, the compelling debut novel by award-winning writer Christopher Coake, there is no shortage of love. There is the love Mark Fife has for his fiancée, Allison. There is his stubborn, somewhat obsessive love for his ex-wife, Chloe, the college sweetheart who left him. And there is the mountain of love he and Chloe both shoulder for their young son, Brendan, whose death in terrifyingly mundane circumstances will send chills down the spine of every parent.

It is seven years after Brendan’s death. Mark is 38, no longer drinks and is on the verge of conquering his misgivings and proposing to Allison. Despite occasional nightmares and the feelings for Chloe he sometimes has to push away, he is sure that he will be happy again.

Then he is paid a visit by the woman who lives in the house where he, Chloe and Brendan lived together, and where Brendan died. She tells him that her fourth-grade son has seen Brendan’s ghost, and that the ghost has been calling for his daddy. Mark initially wants nothing to do with the woman. But as the boy’s story evolves into something more believable, both he and Chloe are drawn in, and toward each other. For Mark, it is heartbreakingly tantalizing: Can he get it back? Have Chloe, the love of his life, and Brendan, whose death he still feels responsible for?

Coake, named by Granta in 2007 as one of the 20 best young American novelists, received the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers for his collection of short stories, We’re in Trouble. His first novel is a wrenching journey through the human heart. You Came Back isn’t a book to start the night before a workday. It reads like a suspense novel and will keep you turning pages longer than is good for you. Afterward, it will leave you lying in bed in the dark, contemplating its surfeit of pain and beauty.

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Read about the wrenching personal story behind You Came Back.