Lauren Bufferd

FictionWorld Fiction

Growing up (a little crooked) in Soviet Russia

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Ellen Litman gives a new twist to the familiar coming of age/boarding school story (think A Separate Peace, Prep, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) in her second novel, Mannequin Girl. Set in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, it features the precocious daughter of two teachers whose life is radically changed when she receives a diagnosis of scoliosis.

The story begins just before 7-year-old Kat Knopman is due to start first grade at the Moscow day school where her parents are teachers. Bright and just a little bit spoiled, Kat worships her parents, the beautiful but imperious Anechka and softhearted Misha. Young Jewish intellectuals, they are involved in the arts and dabble at the fringes of radical politics. But Kat’s dream of being their star pupil ends when she is sent to a boarding school on the outskirts of the city for children with spinal ailments. Kat proves to be tougher than even her formidable teachers, unsympathetic peers and grueling medical regimens, but the consuming disappointment of not being the healthy golden child she thinks her parents want proves more restrictive than any back brace. As she matures, Kat gradually comes to accept the flaws inherent in her parents, just as she begins to outgrow the debilitating disease.

Mannequin Girl is set just at the beginning of perestroika and what became the gradual dissolution of the Soviet system. This brought more freedom, but it also revealed an ugly rise in Nationalism and anti-Semitism, which curtails Kat’s opportunities as well as those of her friends and family.

Litman, who was born in Moscow, was herself diagnosed with scoliosis and spent many years attending a similar school/sanatorium. She writes sympathetically of the shifting alliances and friendships within a boarding school, as well as the gritty details of an adolescence spent in a full-body brace. In Mannequin Girl, she has written a sharp and occasionally tender novel with a prickly protagonist readers can’t help but care for.

Ellen Litman gives a new twist to the familiar coming of age/boarding school story (think A Separate Peace, Prep, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) in her second novel, Mannequin Girl. Set in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, it features the precocious daughter of two teachers whose life is radically changed when she receives a diagnosis of scoliosis.

FictionLiterary Fiction

In an art gallery by the sea, a young curator finds her place

Review by Lauren Bufferd

An unnamed, ingenue heroine. A dramatic location by the sea. A wealthy and cultured older gentleman. If this sounds like the plot of the beloved mystery Rebecca, it is—but Rachel Pastan’s third novel pays homage to the Daphne du Maurier classic while adding a few new twists. Alena’s young heroine is a curator at a small art museum in the Midwest. Visiting the Venice Biennale with her employer, she is introduced to Bernard Augustin, the wealthy and enigmatic founder of the Nauquasset, a museum on Cape Cod that specializes in cutting-edge work. The Nauk has been closed for two years, ever since the disappearance of the chief curator, Alena. When Augustin offers the position to our narrator, she is eager to prove herself, but she is soon drawn into deep emotional and ethical entanglements at the museum. 

The remaining staff at the Nauk is fiercely loyal to Alena’s memory, to the point of keeping her private office like a shrine. A performance artist whose violent imagery references the first Gulf War turns up, claiming Alena promised him the next exhibition, but the young curator finds herself drawn instead to the work of a local ceramicist—a conflict that leads to rifts among the museum staff. It is to Pastan’s credit that she makes the curatorial arguments as compelling as the mystery of Alena’s disappearance. 

For people who love Rebecca, there are all kind of allusions and asides—names, locations and plot points. The transformation of Mrs. Danvers to Agnes, the Nauk’s creepy bookkeeper and business manager, is especially clever. But Alena stands on its own, and Pastan’s experience working in a contemporary art museum brings a grounded reality to the running of a museum and the complex questions of identity, aesthetics and originality in contemporary art.

An unnamed, ingenue heroine. A dramatic location by the sea. A wealthy and cultured older gentleman. If this sounds like the plot of the beloved mystery Rebecca, it is—but Rachel Pastan’s third novel pays homage to the Daphne du Maurier classic while adding a few new twists. Alena’s young heroine is a curator at a small art museum in the Midwest. Visiting the Venice Biennale with her employer, she is introduced to Bernard Augustin, the wealthy and enigmatic founder of the Nauquasset, a museum on Cape Cod that specializes in cutting-edge work.

FictionWorld Fiction

A grandmother’s tale of homecoming

Review by Lauren Bufferd

When Edmund de Waal began to research the history of his family, he had no idea that he was embarking on a journey that would take him five years to complete and would encompass several continents. His exploration of the wealthy Ephrussis family became the subject of the award-winning memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes. As part of his research, de Waal’s father handed him a stack of manuscripts belonging to Edmund’s grandmother, Elisabeth de Waal, including the novel The Exiles Return, which is now being published for the first time.

Elisabeth Ephrussis de Waal was born into an exceptionally privileged family in turn-of-the-century Vienna. She studied philosophy and economics and was also a gifted poet. Living in Paris and then London, she traveled to Vienna weeks after the German invasion of 1938 to save her parents and was able to bring her father to England. After the war, she returned to Vienna to discover what had happened to her family and their belongings, a quest that kept her working for justice for more than a decade.

Set in Vienna in the early 1950s, The Exiles Return is less a novel than a series of tightly written overlapping portraits of exiles coming to terms with a radically changed landscape. Jewish scientist Professor Kuno Adler has been living in America, safely, albeit unhappily, with his corsetiere wife. He goes back, not just to Vienna, but to the laboratory where he once worked, insisting they owe him his previous job. Despite lingering anti-Semitism, Vienna is his home, and he is eager to reclaim it. Most poignant is the arrival of Resi, the brooding teenage daughter of a Viennese princess. Raised in America, Resi is sent back to Vienna to stay with relatives, and, like a Henry James heroine, her innocence is no match for European experience, made all the more desperate in the postwar economy. But it is postwar Vienna that is de Waal’s greatest character, a city trying to rebuild in a totally altered world after terrible devastation.

The Exiles Return explores identity, loss, departure and perhaps the greater pain of return. Though none of these characters are a direct portrait of their creator, each one carries a fragment of her experience. The clear, almost spare writing leaves plenty of space in which to imagine the powerful emotions at play in this quietly devastating novel.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Edmund de Waal for The Exiles Return.

When Edmund de Waal began to research the history of his family, he had no idea that he was embarking on a journey that would take him five years to complete and would encompass several continents. His exploration of the wealthy Ephrussis family became the…

FictionHistorical Fiction

A Middle Ages heroine, brought to life

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In the tradition of Mary Renault, Sigrid Undset and, more recently, Hilary Mantel, novelist Nicola Griffith recreates the past in Hild, a lively look at the girl who would become Saint Hilda of Whitby, one of the key figures of early Christianity.

Hild was born in 614, the niece of one of England’s most powerful tribal kings. Little is known about her early life, though the story is that her mother was told in a dream that she would give birth to the light of the world. Hild was part of the king’s court when the entire household was baptized as Christians in 627. Twenty years later, she became the abbess of one of the most notable religious communities in Europe, counselor to kings and a teacher of bishops.

The novel begins with the death of Hild’s father when she was three, and ends when she is 19, well before she became an abbess. Griffith’s young Hild is perceptive, canny and thoughtful. Fulfilling the prophecy of her birth, she becomes a seer and advisor to her uncle. She is quick to understand the value of literacy, the impact of trade routes and the power behind the new religion. Her observations of the natural world lead her to understand what motivates those around her. She forms relationships easily with the common folk, developing networks of loyal followers.

Medieval England was a complex landscape of warring dynasties and vicious politics, and is probably less familiar to the reader than the court of Henry VIII or even Alexander the Great’s Macedonia. Griffith has clearly immersed herself in this world to bring it to life for the reader—the politics, languages, occupations as well as the food, dress and drink—and this extensive research occasionally threatens to overtake the characters. But the details are engrossing, and her depiction of a young woman whose actions would change history is a compelling one.

In the tradition of Mary Renault, Sigrid Undset and, more recently, Hilary Mantel, novelist Nicola Griffith recreates the past in Hild, a lively look at the girl who would become Saint Hilda of Whitby, one of the key figures of early Christianity.

Hild was born…

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Luminaries

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Eleanor Catton’s historical suspense novel The Luminaries is built like a triple Decker—one of those 19th-century novels that were so substantial, they were published serially in three volumes. Clocking in at over 800 pages, this pitch-perfect Victorian pastiche set in New Zealand has all the right elements: long-lost siblings, hidden caches of letters, a séance and a villainess so wicked she could have walked right out of a Wilkie Collins novel.

When Walter Moody comes to Hokitika in 1866, it is to make his fortune in the gold fields. At his hotel, he happens upon a meeting of 12 men nervously discussing a rash of mysterious local occurrences. A prostitute has been arrested after overdosing on opium. A wealthy man has disappeared. A recluse was discovered dead in his isolated cabin. Moody is drawn into the intrigue, though he initially keeps his own secrets about the strange events that occurred on his voyage from England.

Several period devices help tease out the threads of this complex story: multiple narrators; 19th-century slang and circumlocutions such as “d-mned”; and chapter introductions that set the stage for the action to follow. Intriguingly, Catton uses astrology as an organizing device, with star charts at the start of each chapter—which grow shorter and shorter as the book progresses, to imitate the waning of the moon—and the circling of 12 “stellar” characters around eight “planetary” ones.

Like many long novels, The Luminaries lags at times; in some ways, the action concludes long before the novel does, and the wealth of characters and overlapping action make it occasionally difficult to keep track of who did what when. But Catton, whose debut novel, The Rehearsals, was written when she was just 22, balances this with accomplished writing that shows an engaging flair and a real gift for characterization. This multilayered and complex second novel is as much about the sheer enjoyment of reading as it is about solving the crime.

A brilliant, intricate mystery unfolds in New Zealand.
FictionHistorical Fiction

A gruesome murder brought to life

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In one of the first nationally sensationalized crimes in America, conman Harry Powers sought out vulnerable widows through matrimonial agencies, courted them and then lured them to their deaths, supposedly for financial gain, though evidence suggests money was not the issue. After murdering Asta Eicher and her three children in 1931, he was caught, put on trial and executed. The lurid details of the case preoccupied Depression-era newspapers for months.

Author Jayne Anne Phillips grew up hearing about this crime, which took place in her home state of West Virginia, and has been haunted by the story for decades. In Quiet Dell, Phillips boldly imagines the last year of the life of the Eicher family, especially the fanciful youngest daughter, Annabel, whose creativity and imagination may have provided the spark that Phillips needed to deal with such grim material. The novel begins the Christmas before the crime: The Eicher children have just lost their beloved grandmother, and the widowed Asta is making plans to meet “Cornelius Pierson,” the mysterious man who has been courting her by mail. Cornelius—one of Powers’ aliases—appears chivalrous and elegant, promising to marry her, care for her children and provide a fresh start in West Virginia. Of course, the story ends quite differently.

To more fully explore the crime, Phillips has created a team of fictional reporters, Emily Thornhill and Eric Lindstrom, who travel from the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge to West Virginia and back again in their attempt to see justice done. Emily is also drawn romantically to Park Ridge banker William Malone, who was well acquainted with the Eichers. His guilt over not doing more to help the grieving Asta motivates him to fund the investigation, and his relationship with Emily, passionately and beautifully told, provides balance to the violence of the crime.

Archival records such as court transcripts, letters, photographs and period newspaper articles provide a framework for Quiet Dell, but it’s Phillips’ masterful imagination and sense of empathy that brings an emotional weight and dignity to a story that transcends the genre of true crime.

In one of the first nationally sensationalized crimes in America, conman Harry Powers sought out vulnerable widows through matrimonial agencies, courted them and then lured them to their deaths, supposedly for financial gain, though evidence suggests money was not the issue. After murdering Asta Eicher…

FictionHistorical Fiction

A tenuous neutrality

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In The Two Hotel Francforts, novelist David Leavitt (The Indian Clerk) takes his readers right to the brink: to the edge of continental Europe and a war that for many seemed like the end of civilization itself.

The novel is set in 1940s Lisbon, the last neutral port in Europe, overflowing with refugees of every nationality. Among the crowd are American expatriates Pete and Julia Winters. The Winters have been living in Paris, where Pete is a car salesman, but are planning to return to New York because Julia is Jewish. Neurotic even at the best of times, Julia is adamant about not leaving Europe, despite the danger—and even though everything about Portugal, from the food to the accommodations, makes her desperately unhappy. The Winters meet Edward and Iris Freleng, who are traveling with their elderly fox terrier. The Frelengs write mystery novels published under a single pseudonym, and their lazy, somewhat bohemian spirit and careless debauchery draw the American couple closer. A kind of strange ennui born of waiting amid the life-threatening tension prevails, and when Edward instigates an affair with Pete, everything threatens to unravel, including the sanity of both Julia and Edward.

The cobwebbed world of half-truths and lies inhabited by these characters is echoed by the shadowy setting of wartime Lisbon. Portugal’s neutrality masks the unsettling politics of the Salazar government, just as the couples’ untethered lives hide a hollow core at the center of each marriage. Like authors Graham Greene or Ford Madox Ford, Leavitt suggests that the moral ambiguities let loose during the pressures of wartime push people to extremes that they might never have reached otherwise.

Leavitt’s setting may be unsavory, but his storytelling is not, with complex characters and rich details that bring the seedy hotels and crowded cafes to life. This is a brittle tale told with an effortless ease.

In The Two Hotel Francforts, novelist David Leavitt (The Indian Clerk) takes his readers right to the brink: to the edge of continental Europe and a war that for many seemed like the end of civilization itself.

The novel is set in 1940s Lisbon, the last…

Fiction

The gravity between us

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The phrase subtle bodies refers to the part of ourselves that is not our physical form but rather our consciousness, spirit, the essence of what makes us who we are. In his third and long-awaited novel of the same name, Norman Rush explores what happens when a group of college friends reunite for the funeral of one of their own, forcing them to examine the core experiences of who they once were and how their lives have changed over the ensuing decades.

Subtle Bodies takes place just before the outbreak of the second Iraq War and is set in motion by the death of Douglas, the charismatic ringleader of a group of college friends who continued to live together for several years after graduation. Doug’s unique brand of humor unified the group, and their communal life was a kind of highly self-conscious performance art filled with private jokes and even a secret language.

Four of the now 40-something men are summoned to Doug’s Hudson River Valley estate to take part in an elaborate memorial service. Once a seamless community of acolytes following the direction of their self-appointed leader, they now struggle to find ways to connect. Ned, who is planning the coordination of a large antiwar demonstration in California, comes to New York begrudgingly, questioning the very significance of the group. Can what seemed essential at age 20 still be relevant at age 40?  His wife, Nina, follows him in hot pursuit. After years of childlessness, the couple is at a critical point in trying to get pregnant, and she is reluctant to let Ned go, even for a weekend. 

Subtle Bodies is told by Ned and Nina in alternating chapters, with Ned struggling to understand just what made Doug so influential and Nina’s wisecracking irreverence for her husband’s mentor. In fact, it is her tart commentary and the way she gently pokes fun at what the group once held sacred that give this novel much of its quirky charm.

Subtle Bodies is the first of Rush’s novels not set in Africa. It is also shorter by half than either Mating or Mortals. But Rush’s sharp observations of human foibles and his singular take on marriage and sex will be familiar to fans of his earlier work. A concise, humorous novel about what we discard and what we keep as we age, Subtle Bodies will both delight and make you think.

The phrase subtle bodies refers to the part of ourselves that is not our physical form but rather our consciousness, spirit, the essence of what makes us who we are. In his third and long-awaited novel of the same name, Norman Rush explores what happens…

Fiction

A sinister struggle

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Patrick Flanery’s ambitious second novel, Fallen Land, falls somewhere between a dystopian thriller and a social critique. Driven mad by failed ambition, a property developer builds a bunker beneath his former home and begins to terrorize the home’s new owners. Drawing connections between the housing crisis, the growth of the incarceration industry and the history of race relations dating back to the riots of 1919, Flanery manages to both provoke and enthrall in this densely plotted page-turner.

Paul Kovik, an ambitious but unskilled builder, had dreamed of creating a large housing complex on undeveloped local farmland in an unnamed locale somewhere in the Midwest. Unfortunately, he was not much of a craftsman, and was forced to declare bankruptcy several years into the project. Leaving behind a half-finished sprawl of neo-Victorian McMansions and abandoned by his wife and children, Kovik builds a bunker beneath his signature home and hides there. After the foreclosed property is sold to Julia and Nathaniel Noailles from Massachusetts, Kovik emerges at night like an angry poltergeist—rearranging furniture and frightening the Noailles’ young son, Copley. Their elderly African-American neighbor, Louise, whose family owned the original farmland, still lives in a nearby house, watching and eventually intervening as the Noailles struggle with the sinister mysteries of their new home.

There is a palpable sense of apocalyptic menace hovering over the novel, and Flanery excels at depicting the lengths to which people go when their economic livelihood is threatened. The sufferings of the Noallies, especially Copley, pack an emotional wallop. The sinister corporation where Nathaniel works, which has tentacles in security systems, education and the building of prisons, feels eerily familiar: If such a corporation doesn’t exist yet, it may soon. The problem is when all these elements are combined, the sum is less than the collection of its parts. The pile-up of issues in the last quarter of the novel (child abuse, rape, suicide, terrorism and race relations, to name a few) negate the effect Flanery is working to establish. Flanery’s debut, Absolution, was an elegant and moving novel that also looked unsparingly at race and the burden of history. It is clear that he is a gifted storyteller with plenty to say. He just doesn’t have to say it all at once. 

Patrick Flanery’s ambitious second novel, Fallen Land, falls somewhere between a dystopian thriller and a social critique. Driven mad by failed ambition, a property developer builds a bunker beneath his former home and begins to terrorize the home’s new owners. Drawing connections between the housing…

Fiction

Keeping up with a flighty sister

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Cathleen Schine’s latest novel, Fin & Lady, begins at the funeral of Fin’s mother in rural Connecticut in the early 1960s. His father has already passed away, and his older half sister, Lady, whom Fin hasn’t seen in six years, is now his legal guardian. Fin’s only memory of Lady is from a trip to Capri, where he and his parents went looking for Lady after she jilted her fiancé. Glamorous, careless and charismatic, Lady seems like an unlikely guardian for an 11-year-old boy, but she is all Fin has. Together, they set up a home in New York, first in the West Side apartment Lady inherited, then in Greenwich Village, where Fin comes of age along with the decade.

Lady is obsessed with her freedom, but equally consumed with being loved, and charges Fin with the inappropriate task of selecting the perfect husband. Lady is pursued by three ardent suitors—Tyler, a lawyer and the former fiancé; Biffi Deutsch, a Hungarian gallery owner; and Jack, a preppy jock. None of them seems quite right to Fin, although he likes Biffi the best, and Lady goes from one to another with a cavalier charm. Only Fin can see the pain behind her recklessness, the urge to run that Lady fights on a daily basis.

In a more conventional novel, there would be some kind of moral comeuppance for Lady’s irresponsibility and demands for adult behavior from a teenager. But in Schine’s world, nonconformity is acceptable, even preferable, and the family you make is as important as the one you are born into. Placed against the backdrop of the revolutionary 1960s, this nontraditional family seems part and parcel of the era’s social changes.

Just as the spirit of Jane Austen wafted through The Three Weissmanns of Westport, Fin & Lady seems inspired by Homer’s Odyssey—from the three suitors who hang around the Greenwich Village apartment to the references to Capri (the original home of the Sirens) and the battered copy of the Greek epic that Lady sends to Fin after she runs away for the second time.

Schine’s novels are as light and crisp as a perfectly baked meringue. They are sentimental, but without a shred of the saccharine, and she writes with a deeply felt empathy for all her characters. This comic romance will delight her fans, and may also win her some new readers for whom the swinging ’60s in New York and Capri may hold a special appeal.

Cathleen Schine’s latest novel, Fin & Lady, begins at the funeral of Fin’s mother in rural Connecticut in the early 1960s. His father has already passed away, and his older half sister, Lady, whom Fin hasn’t seen in six years, is now his legal guardian. Fin’s…

Fiction

Unlikely connections

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In his new novel, TransAtlantic, Colum McCann proves once again why he is one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. Like the award-winning Let the Great World Spin, TransAtlantic explores the connections between people of different classes and ethnicities, but this time over centuries and between continents. McCann mixes actual historic events with the story of a singular Irish-American family. The interplay between the celebrated (who all happen to be men) and the ordinary (who all happen to be women) is one of the many strengths of this most notable book.

TransAtlantic begins with three momentous crossings. Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown, two WWI aviators, set course from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1919 on the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Almost 75 years earlier, Frederick Douglass makes his way to Dublin and Cork, seeking funding for the abolitionist movement. Jump to the end of the 20th century, and Senator George Mitchell is flying from New York to Belfast to broker the notoriously bitter Northern Ireland peace talks in what became known as the Good Friday Agreements of 1998.

McCann explores historical events through the lens of the everyday.

These iconic journeys are connected by a series of personal stories starting with Lily Duggan, a young maid in the Dublin home where Douglass is staying. His message of emancipation has a profound effect on her, and she immigrates to the United States. The novel follows her daughter and granddaughter to Canada and then back to Ireland, culminating in the story of Hannah Carson, the last of the Duggans, in the family cottage on the coast of Northern Ireland. The stories are tied together by a letter sent on that first transatlantic flight, though its re-appearance at the story’s denouement is somewhat anticlimactic.

McCann is most interested in the details behind the big stories and in the way historical events shape and transform thousands of smaller lives. Douglass’ pursuit of freedom inspires Lily’s departure from Ireland. Alcock and Brown transform a war machine into a mode of international travel. The faith both men hold in the nature of flight is echoed in Mitchell’s tireless work and the seeming paradox of achieving peace by preparing for war. These kinds of contradictions—holding multiple opposing truths or ideas—are also central to the novel.

TransAtlantic is a story of great profundity. Time, events and actions are interwoven in a gorgeous meditation on violence, the quest for peace and the balance between the two. McCann offers the reader new ways of seeing and thinking about historic events and their impact on the present. This is a novel to relish.

In his new novel, TransAtlantic, Colum McCann proves once again why he is one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. Like the award-winning Let the Great World Spin, TransAtlantic explores the connections between people of different classes and ethnicities, but this time…

FictionWorld FictionDebut Fiction

We Need New Names

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In We Need New Names, 10-year-old Darling and her gang of friends roam their shantytown in ­Zimbabwe with the mischievous spirit of children at play. Whether they are stealing guavas or engaged in one of their made-up neighborhood games, they are argumentative and spirited: Life is a game even in these surroundings. But in her quieter moments, Darling is haunted by her memories of Before—when she lived in a house with her parents, when her father wasn’t working a dangerous job in South Africa, when she was allowed to go to school.

Author NoViolet Bulawayo is a fresh voice on the scene, exploring both the dangers and the comforts of Darling’s African home, and her uneasy assimilation to life in the West.

When Darling is sent to live with her aunt in Detroit, her adjustment is slow. America brings her increased opportunities for learning, but her sense of guilt over the country she has left behind also grows. Trips to the mall, cell phones, the perils of Internet porn—Darling navigates a world similar to that of many American teenagers, but her sense of isolation distances her from her new friends. Like so many immigrants before her, Darling is tied to her old country, even as she struggles to adapt to the new.

We Need New Names reads like a series of very good linked stories, without the structure and force of a developed novel. Though we sense what Darling has given up by leaving her home, the chapters about her life as a teenage girl in the United States lack singularity. Where We Need New Names breaks new ground is in the depiction of modern-day Zimbabwe from a child’s point of view. Bulawayo, whose writing has been championed by Junot Díaz, excels in capturing the frank voice of the younger Darling, who has a naiveté and an innocence that flourishes in spite of the dangers. Bulawayo’s sensitivity to a child’s experience and her ability to connect that to a larger commentary on contemporary Zimbabwe make her a writer to watch.

A promising debut of displacement in America.
FictionWorld Fiction

The lasting connection of a homeland

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, Americanah, begins in a train station in Princeton, New Jersey, where Ifemelu is on her way to Trenton to get her hair braided. This errand, seemingly simple, could stand as a microcosm for a plot that is all about transitions—epic, life-altering journeys from Nigeria to America and London, the transition from high school to college, the evolution of teenage crushes to true love, right down to the minute, but no less significant, detail of where a black girl can get her hair done.

Americanah is an engaging novel about love, change and identity in today’s globalized world that is not to be missed.

Ifemelu and Obinze fell in love as teenagers in Lagos. The military dictatorship in Nigeria made it almost impossible for them to complete college, and both hoped to go to the United States. Ifemelu left Africa first, living in Brooklyn with her aunt and cousin Dike, and then on to college in Philadelphia. The plan was for Obinze to join her, but, unable to get a visa after 9/11, he instead went to London and plunged into the dangerous life of an undocumented immigrant. Both young people did whatever they could to survive, and the subsequent feelings of shame and embarrassment changed their relationship.

Fifteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man with a family in newly democratized Nigeria. Ifemelu is at Princeton, the author of a wildly successful blog about race in America with the wonderful tongue-in-cheek title Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (those formerly known as Negros) by a Non-American Black. She has a sexy academic boyfriend and a lively and diverse group of friends. But she is homesick for Nigeria, and realizes that her thoughts of returning are all wrapped up in her unresolved feelings for Obinze.

As she did with Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie creates a multigenerational tale, spanning three continents and incorporating the complicated politics of Lagos, the slippery codes of race and class, and the emotional network of family and friends. The novel is stuffed with characters—single mothers, students, hairdressers, cab drivers, academics—each a perfectly realized portrait in a lively tapestry. Adichie’s observations are needle-sharp when it comes to race, but her empathy makes Americanah—a term that is used for Nigerians who go to America and return with an exaggerated sense of superiority—a warm and surprisingly funny read. Americanah is an engaging novel about love, change and identity in today’s globalized world that is not to be missed.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, Americanah, begins in a train station in Princeton, New Jersey, where Ifemelu is on her way to Trenton to get her hair braided. This errand, seemingly simple, could stand as a microcosm for a plot that is all about transitions—epic, life-altering journeys from Nigeria to America and London, the transition from high school to college, the evolution of teenage crushes to true love, right down to the minute, but no less significant, detail of where a black girl can get her hair done.

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