Lauren Bufferd

FictionLiterary Fiction

Trust Exercise

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise is not exactly what it seems. Though the story explores the ways adolescent experience reverberates through adulthood, it also brilliantly topples all expectations of narrative fiction.

The novel opens in the mid-1980s at an elite high school for the performing arts, where students compete for roles in a rarefied bubble of camaraderie and pressure. Two rising sophomores, David and Sarah, have an intense sexual relationship over one summer, which ends shortly after school begins. Their bitter breakup and estrangement become the talk of their classmates, and even their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley, seems obsessed as he invites Sarah to confide in him and continues to pair the two teens in classroom exercises. When a British director brings his troupe of young actors to the high school for an ill-fated production of Candide, Sarah is drawn into a hapless relationship with the production’s star while her bland classmate Karen pines for the group’s louche director. 

Just when this hothouse atmosphere gets a bit too stifling, there is a shocking spiral of events that ricochets the action into the future and completely transforms the premise of the novel. What readers may have believed to be true about David, Sarah and Karen may not be true, but it may not be completely false either. It is not until the final pages of the novel’s short coda that another layer of events is uncovered and the complete picture falls into place. Or does it?

Trust Exercise questions the very nature of fiction, and in a novel that depicts the fluctuating power dynamics between parents and students, students and teachers, and men and women, it suggests that the one who has the most power is the one who remains to tell the final version of the story. 

We trust novels to tell us a story exactly the way it happened, but fiction, Choi suggests, has its own rules.

Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise explores the ways adolescent experience reverberates through adulthood while brilliantly toppling all expectations of narrative fiction.

Fiction

The River

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Fresh on the heels of 2017 bestseller Celine, Peter Heller has struck gold again with The River, about two college friends whose peaceful camping trip turns into a nightmarish combination of natural dangers, life-threatening disasters and human malice.

Dartmouth classmates Jack and Wynn have cleared a few weeks for fly-fishing and whitewater canoeing in northern Canada. Raised on a ranch in Colorado, Jack finds camping and hunting to be as natural as breathing. Wynn is a gentle soul from rural Vermont whose random trailside installations of stones, twigs and flowers do not take away from his acumen out of doors. The young men share a love of literature and outdoor sport, and imagine their two-week trek to be one of leisurely paddling, blueberry picking and reading around the campfire. This idyll is abruptly shattered when they sniff out the fumes of a swiftly approaching forest fire. Wynn and Jack agree to turn back and warn a couple they heard arguing the day before. This proves to be a fateful decision, as the woman, Maia, is found injured and bloody, and her husband, Pierre, no longer on the scene. The two men, with the badly shocked Maia in tow, are now on the run from the fire and, equally threatening, from a possibly homicidal husband. As if this weren’t bad enough, the crises put a strain on the two men, and an element of mistrust creeps into their friendship.

Masterfully paced and artfully told, The River is a page turner that demands the reader slow down and relish the sheer poetry of the language. Heller is an experienced outdoorsman and has an extensive background in journalism, having written for Outside and Men’s Magazine and with several nonfiction books on surfing, camping and fishing to his long list of credits—and his familiarity with all facets of the river trip shows. Though stories of man versus nature date back to the Odyssey, The River thrills as Heller invites his characters to confront their own mortality without losing sight of the deep connections between humans and their environment.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Peter Heller for The River.

Two college friends' peaceful camping trip turns into a nightmarish combination of natural dangers, life-threatening disasters and human malice.

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

The Lost Man

Review by Lauren Bufferd

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, starred review, February 2019

Jane Harper has had enormous success with her mystery series about loner Detective Aaron Falk (The Dry and Force of Nature), which married the gritty realism of small-town Australian life with complicated criminal investigations. Her new standalone, The Lost Man, is bound to win her further accolades. It’s a timely and riveting family drama set in a desolate area of Queensland that will keep you guessing until the final pages.

When you live under a punishing sun on a cattle ranch the size of a small European country, you know not to travel without a full complement of food, water and a working vehicle. So when Cam Bright is found dead of dehydration in the desert only a few miles from his well-stocked car, his brothers Nathan and Bub are shocked and baffled. The mystery of Cam’s death brings longstanding family tensions between Nathan, Bub, their mother and Cam’s wife, Ilse, to the fore and escalate when decades-old allegations of Cam’s assault of a summer worker resurface. The burden of understanding these complex family ties falls heavily on older brother Nathan, who is dealing with his unresolved feelings for Ilse and trying to build a relationship with his estranged teenage son.

The grim crimes in The Lost Man are as much shaped by the rural landscape as by the actions of any one individual. With thoughtful regard for the impact of domestic violence, Harper keeps a sharp focus on a handful of characters that populate these enormous tracts of land where neighbors live up to three and four hours apart. As in her previous novels, the harsh environment plays a pivotal role, as significant as any of her characters. An unforgiving wasteland, the ranch is a place where isolation takes a long-simmering psychological toll, and everyone knows being out in the sun for too long could kill you.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Jane Harper's new standalone, The Lost Man, is bound to win her further accolades. It’s a timely and riveting family drama set in a desolate area of Queensland that will keep you guessing until the final pages.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Late in the Day

Review by Lauren Bufferd

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, January 2019

The 30-year bond between two couples is irrevocably broken when one of the friends abruptly dies in Tessa Hadley’s Late in the Day. This well-drawn and absorbing character study bears all the hallmarks of Hadley’s best work: It’s perceptive, intelligent and written with astonishing emotional depth.

Serious but artistic Christine and dreamy, sensuous Lydia have been friends since school. During college, Lydia nursed an unrequited crush on their married French teacher, Alexandr, and Christine began a romance with his friend Zachary. Over the years, the relationships slowly shifted, and the women reallocated their affections without any apparent bitterness or jealousies. Lydia and Zachary eventually married and had a daughter; shortly after, Alex and Christine did the same. The two couples remained active in each other’s lives, socializing, traveling together and eventually working together when Christine began to show her art in Zachary’s gallery. Even their daughters became good friends.

But Zachary’s sudden death from a massive heart attack disturbs the equilibrium. At first, the remaining three are committed to providing comfort and solace for each other. Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine, and Alex goes to Glasgow to bring Lydia and Zachary’s daughter home from college. But without Zachary to stabilize the quartet, old grievances rise up and unhealed wounds are opened. For Christine, Zachary’s death means that she can no longer find a reason to make art. She locks the door to her studio and grows quietly resentful of her husband and best friend. On the other hand, Lydia finds new strength, deciding to be more involved in the business of the gallery and her departed husband’s family trust.

As in Hadley’s earlier novels (The Past and Clever Girl), sexual desire proves an overwhelming force that shapes decisions and actions, but Late in the Day is also about the remaking of an artist and the emergence of self, even in middle age. A master of interpersonal dynamics, Hadley captures the complexity of loss, grief and friendship with a clarity of vision that brings the natural and material worlds into sharp focus.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Tessa Hadley for Late in the Day.

The 30-year bond between two couples is irrevocably broken when one of the friends abruptly dies in Tessa Hadley’s Late in the Day. This well-drawn and absorbing character study bears all the hallmarks of Hadley’s best work: It’s perceptive, intelligent and written with astonishing emotional depth.

FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Western Wind

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Samantha Harvey’s new novel is a carefully paced mystery that takes place during the four days before Lent in the small medieval British village of Oakham. When the town’s wealthiest and most worldly resident, Tom Newman, is reported missing, rumors fly. Was it murder, a suicide or an accidental drowning? The townspeople share their theories in the makeshift confession box of Oakham’s resident priest, John Reve, who balances his own grief with the growing discontent around him. He is not helped by the prying ears and eyes of the local dean, who is determined to uncover village secrets and find the person responsible for Newman’s disappearance—or is he a spy for the local monastery, whose monks would like nothing better than to swallow up Oakham and take the land for their own?

Harvey plots her story in reverse, a chapter per day, beginning on Shrove (Pancake) Tuesday and working back to the previous Saturday. With each day, the reader learns more about the villagers, the clergy and the intriguing Newman, whose continental travels and interests threatened Reve’s established order. Though Oakham is described as a dump of a town populated by outcasts and exiles and cut off from the surrounding countryside by an unbridgeable river, Reve believes in his role as shepherd of his flock, however wayward they may seem.

The Western Wind is filled with the rich details of rural medieval life, but the unique structure of the story gives the novel a fresh and modern sensibility. In addition, Oakham’s remoteness and parochial village church is contrasted with the spiritual changes coming to both England and the rest of Europe, bringing to mind contemporary issues such as Brexit and the refugee crisis.

Harvey, whose previous novels have been nominated for a range of prizes including the Man Booker, has written a densely packed historical novel that never seems dusty or precious, relishing in the psychological intricacies of power and faith but still crackling with suspense and intrigue.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Samantha Harvey’s new novel is a carefully paced mystery that takes place during the four days before Lent in the small medieval British village of Oakham.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Transcription

Review by Lauren Bufferd

A novel from the multiple award-winning author Kate Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Life After Life) is always cause for celebration. Transcription, based on the life of a former Secret Service worker during World War II, is no exception.

A hallmark of Atkinson’s work is her playful use of time. Transcription starts at the end of a life when, at 60, Juliet Armstrong is hit by a car in a London street. Readers are then plunged back to the 1940s, when 18-year-old Juliet finds herself at loose ends after the death of her mother. Eager to assist in the war effort, she joins MI5. Quickly plucked from the initial tasks of departmental filing and collating, she is placed in an agency-owned apartment, where she transcribes recordings of the secret comings and goings of a group of fascist sympathizers. Juliet is eventually given a nom de guerre and sent to infiltrate a group of wealthy appeasers. The work is mostly dull (transcribing) and occasionally terrifying (shimmying down drainpipes). When the war ends, she presumes her role with the agency is finished as well.

A decade later, Juliet is producing children’s radio dramas, and the personnel overlap between MI5 and the BBC is unusually high. When she is confronted by persons she thought were long gone, she realizes that not everything was tied up as neatly as she was led to believe. Though the war is over, it turns out there are still enemies that must be reckoned with.

Atkinson created a new approach to the detective novel in her delightful Jackson Brodie series, which began with Case Histories in 2004. Similarly, Transcription combines elements of the spy novel with Atkinson’s love of British history, a tremendous knack for getting the details right and a unique take on human behavior. Transcription has its share of intrigues and secrets, but it also has a level of wit and poignancy that many espionage novels lack.

Based in part on archival records and period memoirs, Transcription is a rich, sometimes comic, always insightful peek at a unique aspect of British history. Learning about women who participated in the British Secret Service and the BBC is just icing on the cake.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A novel from the multiple award-winning author Kate Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Life After Life) is always cause for celebration. Transcription, based on the life of a former Secret Service worker during World War II, is no exception.

FictionHistorical Fiction

A feminist revision of the ‘Iliad’

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The classics are experiencing a feminist revolution. Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey—the first to be written by a woman—was published to great acclaim at the end of 2016. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, a contemporary reworking of Antigone, won the 2017 Women’s Prize. And American author Madeline Miller has just published Circe, her second novel based on classical characters. Joining this group is the award-winning British novelist Pat Barker (The Regeneration Trilogy, Toby’s Room), whose 14th novel, The Silence of the Girls, is a reimagining of one of the key episodes in the Iliad, told from the perspective of a captured queen living in the Greek army camp during the final weeks of the Trojan War.

Briseis was the queen of one of Troy’s neighboring kingdoms when her city was sacked and her husband and brothers were killed. A prize of battle, she becomes the property of Achilles, and she lives in the women’s quarters but is available to him as his concubine and slave. When King Agamemnon demands Briseis for his own, Achilles relinquishes her but, as a show of resistance, refuses to fight the Trojans any longer. In Barker’s retelling, Briseis finds herself torn between the two men, helpless but also uniquely positioned to observe the power struggle whose outcome will decide the fate of the ancient world.

The Iliad concerns a war fought over a woman, and women play a major role in the epic poem as nurses, wives and, of course, unwilling sex slaves. Yet the lack of women’s voices in the original text is deafening. In The Silence of the Girls, Briseis is the master of the narrative, telling her story in counterpoint to Achilles, becoming her own subject rather than his object. Her voice is wryly observant and wholly cognizant of the cost that she and other women have paid for the violence and abuses of war perpetrated by men. Barker’s retelling of some of the most famous events of the Iliad feels strangely relevant to today—displaced peoples, war refugees, abandoned women and children, sexual violence—and assures us that women’s voices will be silent no longer.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The classics are experiencing a feminist revolution. Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey—the first to be written by a woman—was published to great acclaim at the end of 2016. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, a contemporary reworking of Antigone, won the 2017 Women’s Prize. And American author Madeline Miller has just published Circe, her second novel based on classical characters. Joining this group is the award-winning British novelist Pat Barker (The Regeneration Trilogy, Toby’s Room), whose 14th novel, The Silence of the Girls, is a reimagining of one of the key episodes in the Iliad, told from the perspective of a captured queen living in the Greek army camp during the final weeks of the Trojan War.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Tales on the move

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Olga Tokarczuk is both a commercial and critical success in her native Poland, but Flights is only her third novel to be translated into English and one of her first to be published in the United States. This is especially timely since Tokarzuk and translator Jennifer Croft were awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for the best work of translated fiction. Flights is not a conventional novel; it’s not even a collection of linked short stories but rather a playful amalgam of meditations, fragments and tales that, taken together, explore what it means to be a traveler.

Flights combines intriguing stories of historical figures with more prosaic accounts of overbooked flights and missed trains. The unnamed peripatetic narrator proves a good-natured companion whose childhood vacations extended no further than locales easily reached by the family car. But if her timid parents traveled mostly for the pleasure of returning home, her passion is to stay moving. Drawn to maps and atlases, she is also a frequent visitor to museums that feature taxidermist and anatomical exhibits. Her stories pull the reader deep into the minds and bodies of her subjects, such as a 17th-century Flemish anatomist who discovered the Achilles tendon, and the posthumous return of Chopin’s heart from Paris to his beloved Warsaw home. The contemporary tale of an environmental biologist called to assist a terminally ill friend bears the weight of how much a single journey can change us.

The Polish title of the novel is Bieguni, the name of a mystical Slavic sect that rejected settled lives and lived as nomads. Like a modern member of this little-known and possibly fictitious group, Flights’ narrator is most comfortable when she is crossing borders, dining in airports and striking up conversations with strangers in hotels. In Tokarczuk’s world, travel should always return you a little different from how you set out. Though the connections between sections can sometimes feel choppy, Tokarczuk’s voice comes through as both confident and confiding, often knowing and surprisingly witty, in Croft’s elegant translation.

Though the novel might not be for everyone, Flights is a fine introduction to a major European author, especially for those interested in contemporary or experimental fiction.

Olga Tokarczuk is both a commercial and critical success in her native Poland, but Flights is only her third novel to be translated into English and one of her first to be published in the United States. This is especially timely since Tokarzuk and translator Jennifer Croft were awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for the best work of translated fiction. Flights is not a conventional novel; it’s not even a collection of linked short stories but rather a playful amalgam of meditations, fragments and tales that, taken together, explore what it means to be a traveler.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

A luminous coming-of-age tale

Review by Lauren Bufferd

David Chariandy is a gifted writer whose two novels were finalists for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize. The most recent of these, Brother (2017), is his first to be published in the United States. It is a lyrical coming-of-age story that speaks to timely issues of police brutality and prejudice.

Michael lives with his older brother, Francis, and their mother, Ruth, in the Park, a public housing complex on the edge of Toronto. Like many of the other residents, Ruth is from Trinidad and works double and triple shifts as a cleaning woman. A strict single parent, she has high expectations for her sons. But Francis and Michael have their own dreams, often escaping to the Rouge Valley, an urban oasis where they are free to imagine their future. Charismatic Francis is drawn to hip hop and begins hanging out with neighborhood kids at the local barbershop where they experiment with beats and rhymes, while Michael begins a romance with Aisha, whose father is from the same part of Trinidad as Ruth. But the legacy of poverty and casual prejudices that confront the brothers erodes their confidence and derails their plans. A tragic shooting in the summer of 1991 results in a police crackdown and leads to another act of violence that changes their lives forever.

The novel alternates between the boys’ high school years, as they struggle to establish themselves, and a grimmer, sadder present in which the family must navigate lost hopes and fractured dreams. But when Aisha is called home for her father’s funeral, there is a realization that loss can bring an opportunity for new growth.

Despite its brevity, Brother delivers an epic impact. The novel is poetic without being sentimental and heartbreaking without being manipulative. There are insights here that some may find difficult to take in, yet it would be unwise to disregard. Chariandy has something vital to share about what occurs when young lives are cut down. As readers, it is our duty to listen.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Chariandy for Brother.

David Chariandy is a gifted writer whose two novels were finalists for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize. The most recent of these, Brother (2017), is his first to be published in the United States. It is a lyrical coming-of-age story that speaks to timely issues of police brutality and prejudice.

FictionLiterary Fiction

You can’t sail away from your problems

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Kate Christensen’s novels hit that sweet spot between beach read and literary fiction. With unsparing wit and an eye for sensuous detail, she’s tackled subjects that range from the inhabitants of a singular Brooklyn apartment building (The Astral) to the emotional repercussions of the death of a family’s patriarch (The Great Man). Her sixth novel, The Last Cruise, is set during the final voyage of a vintage ocean liner on a two-week cruise to Hawaii.

Before heading off to the scrapyard, the Queen Isabella is making one last cruise that will emulate the bygone luxuries of the 1950s. Smoking is allowed on board, but internet and phone use are not. There are no children on board. For highbrow entertainment, the ship owners hired the Sabra Quartet, a notable Israeli string ensemble led by violinist Miriam Koslow, now well into her 70s. Below decks, Hungarian sous chef Mick Szabo toils away, lost in fantasies of vintage cocktails and lobster thermidor. Also on board are Christine Thorne, a journalist turned Maine farmer’s wife, and her writer friend Valerie.

Despite the rich food and evening entertainment, the effort to hearken back to an easier, sunnier decade (a decade, let’s remember, that wasn’t equally pleasant for everyone) can’t disguise the fact that the cruise is taking place in a fractured society on a disintegrating planet. Christine and Miriam become aware of the corners cut by the ship’s cynical owners, while Valerie begins to dig into the personal lives of the unhappy crew, hoping for an exclusive. Even Mick can’t help but notice the tensions rising among his staff as rumors begin to spread about layoffs planned by the cruise ship company. When a crisis hits—and boy, does it ever—the passengers find themselves facing the best and worst aspects of civilization.

The Last Cruise can be read as an analogy to our complex political present—the haves and have-nots divided on a floating world with a selfish wealthy owner that flies off as soon as disaster strikes. But it can also be enjoyed as a darkly humorous comedy of manners, with a diverse cast of characters and enough details about sex, food and drink to satisfy any reader.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kate Christensen’s novels hit that sweet spot between beach read and literary fiction. With unsparing wit and an eye for sensuous detail, she’s tackled subjects that range from the inhabitants of a singular Brooklyn apartment building (The Astral) to the emotional repercussions of the death of a family’s patriarch (The Great Man). Her sixth novel, The Last Cruise, is set during the final voyage of a vintage ocean liner on a two-week cruise to Hawaii.

FictionLiterary Fiction

The Great Believers

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Rebecca Makkai is a skilled and versatile writer whose work often contains a quietly comic edge. Her ambitious new novel, The Great Believers, is a change of pace, exploring the effects of the AIDS epidemic on the gay community in Chicago.

The novel begins in 1985. Nico Marcus has died from AIDS-related illnesses, and his parents have banned his partner and friends from attending the funeral. His friends have organized an unofficial wake at the home of local photographer Richard Campo, where gatherers include Yale Tishman, a development director at a university art gallery, and his partner Charlie Keene, editor and owner of the local gay newspaper. Also present is Nico’s fiercely loyal sister, Fiona. Her attachment to Nico’s circle has repercussions that echo decades later, as explored in the novel’s second storyline, set in 2015, which finds Fiona searching for her estranged daughter and staying with Richard, now a world-famous photographer living in Paris.

As is true of many novels with parallel narratives, one storyline initially seems more compelling than the other. Yale’s pursuit of a career-making donation of French art from an unlikely donor and the slow passage of the virus through his circle of friends overshadow the bumpy path of Fiona’s frantic, unfulfilling life. But when Fiona realizes the toll that being a caregiver has taken on her own life, the two stories come together in a way that honors the different forms of suffering on both sides.

As Makkai notes in the afterword, when a heterosexual woman writes a novel about AIDS, some may feel she has crossed “the line between allyship and appropriation.” But The Great Believers reminds us of the powerful connection between fiction and empathic imagination. Makkai does a superb job re-creating the atmosphere of bigotry and moral finger-pointing that existed even in a big city like Chicago during the early years of the epidemic, as well as the enormous changes wrought by compassionate activists, doctors, nurses, lawyers, artists and social workers who did so much to improve the lives and deaths of so many people, especially gay men.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, July 2018
FictionWorld FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Losing childhood and homeland

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The mass killings that took place in Rwanda in the spring of 1994 form the core of Gaël Faye’s Small Country, a miraculous story of before and after, of innocence shattered and of surviving the transformation of paradise into hell.

Already an international bestseller and the winner of multiple awards, Small Country, ably translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone, tells the story of 10-year-old Gabriel living in Burundi with his family. Life is easy in the comfortable expatriate suburb, and even after Gaby’s parents separate, he and his band of friends spend their days stealing mangoes and smoking cigarettes. Though rumors of ethnic tensions rumble over from the Rwandan border, nothing threatens their carefree spirits.

This changes abruptly when war breaks out. Rumors of horrific violence turn into killings in Gaby’s own town, and even his own street. Gaby’s mother, who had traveled to Rwanda to find her brother and aunt, returns forever changed. The divide between Hutu and Tutsi proves insurmountable, and the lessons learned by Gaby and his friends are brutal.

Like his protagonist, Faye was born in Burundi to a French father and Rwandan mother. Faye’s family moved to France after the Rwandan genocide in 1995. Small Country is his first novel, but he’s had previous success as a songwriter and rapper, with songs that uniquely bridge the gap between French pop and African beats. Like Faye’s music, Small Country packs multiple experiences into a small space. The end of childhood, the demands of family and the coming of war, all seen through the eyes of a young person, are told simply and soulfully in under 200 pages.

The mass killings that took place in Rwanda in the spring of 1994 form the core of Gaël Faye’s Small Country, a miraculous story of before and after, of innocence shattered and of surviving the transformation of paradise into hell.

FictionLiterary Fiction

The sharp edges of a literary love triangle

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Adrienne Celt’s second novel follows a young Russian émigré as she is drawn into a complex love triangle with a brilliant novelist and his ambitious wife. Told via a collection of diary entries, letters and documents bequeathed to an elite private high school in memory of the famous Russian novelist who briefly taught there, Invitation to a Bonfire is a cleverly constructed novel about love, obsession and revenge.

Zoe (Zoya) Andropova, an orphaned refugee from the newly formed Soviet Union, is enrolled as a charity case at an boarding school in New Jersey, where she tries her best to fit in with her wealthy classmates. After graduation, with no real options, Zoe takes a job in the school’s newly constructed greenhouse where she is cruelly bullied and ostracized by the students. Desperately lonely, she is especially vulnerable to the attentions of visiting writer Leo Orlov, a Russian émigré like herself. Even his imperious and calculating wife, Vera, whom Zoe remembers meeting in a Soviet youth group, isn’t a deterrent, and Lev and Zoe begin a passionate affair. Before Leo leaves on a dangerous (and fruitless) trip to the USSR to locate an early manuscript, he begs Zoe to help free him from the marriage. As they plan a future together, Zoe realizes that the relationship between the Orlovs is far more complex than she ever realized.

Lev and Vera are very loosely based on Nabokov and his wife, Vera. Vera was well known as the translator and critic of her husband’s most famous works, and the novel pays homage to the great writer in Celt’s use of an unreliable narrator and a title that’s echoes one of Nabokov’s earlier novels. But the cunning plot and Celt’s singular, sparkling prose are very much her own.

Invitation to a Bonfire is part noir, part coming of age and a wholly enjoyable read.

Adrienne Celt’s second novel follows a young Russian émigré as she is drawn into a complex love triangle with a brilliant novelist and his ambitious wife. Told via a collection of diary entries, letters and documents bequeathed to an elite private high school in memory of the famous Russian novelist who briefly taught there, Invitation to a Bonfire is a cleverly constructed novel about love, obsession and revenge.

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