Lauren Bufferd

It is the summer of 1963, and 12-year-old Florine Gilham lives with her parents on The Point, a small fishing village in Maine. She has spent July swimming on the rocky beaches and playing in the piney forests with the same group of friends she’s known all her life. When a prank goes awry, the children are forbidden to play together for the rest of the summer, but that just means that Florine can spend more time with her mother, Carlie. That is, until Carlie disappears. The strength of Morgan Callan Rogers’ Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea lies not in the mystery of Carlie’s disappearance, but in the way her absence shapes and determines Florine’s passage into adulthood and impacts the larger community.

Carlie disappears on an annual “girls weekend” taken with her friend Patty, a fellow waitress at the Lobster Shack. Though local and state law enforcement is called in to work the case, it remains unsolved year after year. When her father begins to drink heavily, Florine moves in with her paternal grandmother, who provides stability she badly needs. As the years pass, Florine enters high school, runs with her same group of friends and is even tempted into a brief drug-fueled affair with the son of one of the wealthy families who summer on the Maine coast. At the same time, she emulates her grandmother’s quiet life—baking bread and knitting sweaters to be sold in the general store, going to church and waiting at the edge of The Point for the fishing boats to return every evening. But without her mother and estranged from her father and his new girlfriend, she often feels that the heart is literally missing from her life.

Rogers grew up in Maine and knows intimately the strengths and drawbacks of living in a small community, where your neighbors know all your business and where what nurtures you can also stifle your growth. The novel is filled with a kind of fresh honesty, as well as dry wit—seen most of all in the character of Florine. She is impetuous and sassy, but truthful to a fault. It is almost impossible not to care about her.

In her seventh novel, Lucky Break, Esther Freud draws on her own experience as a drama student and actress (and the wife of actor David Morrissey) to explore what it takes to pursue a life dedicated to acting. Her cast is a group of young men and women who meet on the first day at a prestigious (and pretentious) drama academy and stay connected over the next decade, even as their professional paths diverge.

Rather than focus on a single character, Freud throws her net wide, the better to explore the varied experiences of these potential thespians. The circle of friends includes plump and plain Nell, who worries that her looks will garner her nothing but small parts as the maid or best friend and grabs at the opportunity to play a penguin in a traveling children’s show. Charlie, whose exotic beauty easily wins her leading roles, finds her interest waning as she discovers new skills that have nothing to with her appearance. Perhaps the most ambitious of them all, Dan, chosen to play Hamlet while still in school, realizes success upon success, but all his accomplishments seem fragile, balanced against a future filled with unknowns. His wife Jemma never pursues her own dreams, finding that Dan’s victories demand sacrifices by the whole family.

Freud creates an atmosphere that is filled with the rich particulars of an actor’s life. Tense auditions, grasping agents, red carpet premieres and predatory directors dot the landscape of seedy pubs, dismal hotels and out-of-the-way location shoots. Freud is able to cast an equally sympathetic eye over all her characters, following their ups and downs with empathy and accuracy. When Nell wavers between two agents, the loyal worker toiling in the crowded office versus the glamorous professional behind the rosewood desk, we never sense Freud’s judgment despite the faint hint of satire.

Best of all, Freud captures the ebb and flow of luck, good and bad, and the literally life-changing effect it has on careers. Bad luck can be as simple and devastating as an outbreak of acne on the day of a shoot, and good luck as fortunate as simply picking up the right phone at the right time. That both occur is one of the many delights of this engaging novel.

Canadian novelist Miriam Toews returns to the subject of Mennonite teenage girls in Irma Voth. Living in a Mennonite enclave in northern Mexico, 19-year-old Irma has been shunned for marrying a local man who abandons her soon after the marriage. Despite her father’s bullying and threats, Irma remains in touch with her mother and younger sister, Aggie. When a notable Mexican filmmaker comes to town to make a movie about the insular religious community, Irma is hired as a translator. To her Mennonite neighbors, Irma’s collaboration proves almost as outrageous as her marriage, and she finds herself at odds with many in the community. It is not long before Irma starts thinking about leaving Mexico altogether and bringing her sister with her.

The novel comes alive in the beautifully handled relationship between the overburdened Irma and the carefree Aggie, who unlike Irma has been able to achieve an emotional distance from her parents. While she and Aggie make their move, Irma struggles to solve the twin mysteries of the family’s initial move to Mexico from Canada and the whereabouts of her older sister, Katie.

Irma Voth may be the most emotionally complex of Toews’ novels. Irma is determined to create a different life for her sisters, but is frustrated by her own feelings of guilt and regret, having inherited her father’s view that the girls were responsible for his abusive behavior. Irma recounts her life with a direct yet artful stream-of-consciousness, and the reader never feels far from her thoughts, whether they are passing observations or her deepest emotions.

Toews based this novel on her own experience working in Mexico with director Carlos Reygadas on the film Silent Light. There she observed firsthand the interaction between the filmmakers and the Mennonite community, descendents from the small group who had first emigrated from Canada in the 1920s in search of religious freedom. Though the combination is almost surreal, this clash of cultures proves truth can often be stranger than fiction.

The heroine of The Echo Chamber, Evie Steppman, has hearing so developed, she can even listen to the past. She recalls conversations taking place while her mother was pregnant with her and overhears voices coming from photographs of the Lagos marketplace of her childhood. Born and raised in Nigeria during the final years of British occupation, Evie moved with her father to Edinburgh and, four decades later, lives holed up in an attic surrounded by the scraps of a peripatetic life. As Evie’s hearing fades, she works diligently to compose her memoir, fearfully facing the prospect of a soundless world,

Like other fictional children who witnessed great political changes (think Oskar in The Tin Drum or Saleem in Midnight’s Children) Evie is well aware of the difference brought about by her keen hearing. Her extraordinary auditory powers made her feel like a freak but also a catalyst of the global changes occurring around her. Her memoir consists of stories from her own life, but also transcriptions of her mother’s journals, harrowing letters from childhood friends describing the massacres of the Nigerian Civil War, and the fairy tales her father told her before she was born. This gives the novel a crowded, lively feeling; it’s not until the reader reaches Damaris’ diary that we realize how much of her life Evie has spent alone. 

Damaris is Evie’s lover—a flighty actress and hanger-on to a Bowie-like rocker. The diary documents the women’s courtship and follows the course of their love to the United States, where Damaris is following a tour and Evie becomes preoccupied with recording the ambient noise of American streets. Author Luke Williams asked colleague Natasha Soobramanien to write these entries, which make up two key chapters allowing the reader to see Evie from the outside and giving the novel some badly needed emotional resonance. 

Williams, who is Scottish, blends interests in history and storytelling to create an impressive novel of ideas and sounds, from the brittle clatter of the expatriate cocktail party to the sonic emptiness of a lonely life. The air of melancholy that floats over this novel is mitigated by Williams’ elegant style and vivid imagination. The Echo Chamber is not an easy novel, but one in which the skillful fusion of reality and fantasy powerfully reverberates for the engaged reader. 

An engrossing double love story set in the not-so-swinging ’60s and a contemporary London news office, The Last Letter from Your Lover offers a captivating tale of missed connections.

The novel opens when the victim of a bad traffic accident, Jennifer Stirling, wakes up in a hospital room unable to remember anything. Nothing is familiar to this Grace Kelly look-alike, not even her husband. After she is released, she is haunted by the strangeness of her surroundings and by her husband’s reserved manner. Finding a series of love letters addressed to her and signed “B” carefully hidden around her house confirms her sense that her marriage was an unhappy one. But who was her lover? Held back by fear and the rigid conventions of the early 1960s, Jennifer hesitates to grasp at a remembered chance of happiness, even after she discovers the identity of the man for whom she was willing to risk so much.

Forty years later, journalist Ellie Haworth uncovers a group of love letters signed “B” in the newspaper archives. The passion and tenderness of the letters draw Ellie in. She can’t help but compare the intensity of the letters with the cryptic text messages she receives from John, a married man with whom she is having an affair. As she labors to discover the people behind these mysterious letters, Ellie re-examines the choices she has made.

Author Jojo Moyes artfully combines the two threads of this romantic tale in ways that not only avoid cliché but offer continuous surprises. More than a simple framing device, Ellie’s story thoughtfully reflects Jennifer’s dilemma. In some ways, The Last Letter from Your Lover is itself a love letter to the all-but-disappearing handwritten message. But Moyes is too honest to simply pine for what once was; though Ellie may long for the passion behind a scribbled love note, the changing times offer her a freedom that Jennifer never had.