Lauren Bufferd

FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Three lives tangled together

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The warmth that suffuses Sarah Winman’s new novel is pervasive. Though little more than 200 pages in length, Tin Man is plentiful in love, beauty and acts of human kindness.

Ellis and Michael are preteens when they first meet in working- class Oxford, England. An immediate camaraderie develops as the two boys learn to swim, bike the city streets and avoid the swinging fists of their gruff, uncommunicative fathers. Both boys are close to Ellis’ mother, Dora, a woman who makes sure there is always room for art in the family home. But after Dora’s death, Ellis’ father gives the boy no choice but to put his artistic skills to work as a tin man at the local car plant, removing dents and dings so dexterously that customers cannot feel where the damage was.

From the start, the friendship between Ellis and Michael borders on intimacy, and on a 10-day trip to the south of France, they begin a love affair that ends as quickly as it flares up. Not long after, Ellis meets and marries Annie. The three are inseparable until Michael moves to London, eventually cutting off communication with the couple and disappearing into the city.

This gentle novel is told in two parts. In the first, Ellis, now a middle-aged widower, lives a straitened life, still working at the car plant but dreaming of roads untaken. Recovering from a cycling accident gives him the opportunity to recall his special relationships with Annie and Michael and how they helped define him. The second half is drawn from Michael’s diaries, detailing his life in London as a gay man, his struggles after he is diagnosed with AIDS and his decision to return to Oxford.

Although sometimes lacking in characterization (Annie, in particular, is not fleshed out enough), Winman’s compassionate look at the fluidity of sexual identity, youthful passion and middle-aged regret is rich in emotion and proves that great things do come in small packages.

 

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

The warmth that suffuses Sarah Winman’s new novel is pervasive. Though little more than 200 pages in length, Tin Man is plentiful in love, beauty and acts of human kindness.

FictionDebut Fiction

Rock ‘n’ roll hearts

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Chelsey Johnson’s Stray City brings an original angle to the trope of exploring the family you’re born into and the family that you choose. More than a coming-out novel (though it’s that, too), this debut is an insightful and entertaining love letter to the LGBTQ community in Portland, Oregon.

Estranged from her family in Nebraska, Andy (Andrea) Morales has created a home and community for herself in Portland’s small but thriving lesbian community in the early 1990s (think fanzines, mixtapes, dive bars and riot grrrls). But after a bad breakup, she hooks up with Ryan Coates, the drummer in a band on the verge of making it big. What should have been a one-night stand turns into a relationship—after all, it feels so good to be wanted. Andy keeps the relationship secret for as long as she can, but when she discovers that she’s pregnant, she decides to keep the baby, much to the astonishment of her friends. But as grateful as she is for Ryan’s attention, she can’t hide her ambivalence about him as a life partner.

A decade later, Andy is happily settled with her lover, Beatriz, but her precocious daughter, Lucia, has begun asking questions about her biological father. Andy must decide how to resolve past decisions with the life she’s worked so hard to attain.

According to Johnson, Stray City began as a short story about Ryan, in which he’s stranded in a van in rural Minnesota with a guilty secret. The more Johnson worked on it, the more she was curious about the pregnant girlfriend he’d left behind in Portland. Johnson’s love of Portland and its “strays and refugees” is what gives Stray City its singular charm. Though the story dips into the grim reality of homophobic hate crimes (Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard were both murdered in the ’90s), Stray City never loses its quirky point of view or Andy’s fresh perspective.

 

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

Chelsey Johnson’s Stray City brings an original angle to the trope of exploring the family you’re born into and the family that you choose. More than a coming-out novel (though it’s that, too), this debut is an insightful and entertaining love letter to the LGBTQ community in Portland, Oregon.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Of foxes and chance encounters

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In Aminatta Forna’s fourth novel, Happiness, the collision of two strangers on a London bridge sets in motion a series of events involving a missing child, a mysterious court case and city-dwelling foxes.

When animal biologist Jean Turane is knocked down by Attila Asare on Waterloo Bridge, she is in pursuit of a fox whose behavior she’s been chronicling as part of a larger study on urban wildlife. Attila, a noted psychologist from Ghana, is on his way to a dinner. Both have devoted their professional lives to understanding and interpreting behavior, whether in child soldiers or animals, and find that their initial meeting, however accidental, reveals they have much in common. Attila is in town to present a paper on war-related post-traumatic stress disorder but also plans to visit family and to check in on Rose, a former lover and co-worker diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. Over the next 10 days, Attila’s niece is swept up in an immigration crackdown, and Rose’s needs prove ill served by the nursing home, while Jean gets drawn more deeply into a citywide fox-culling controversy. Both Attila and Jane turn to neighborhood residents—mostly North African immigrants—to assist them in their searches for missing relatives and elusive foxes, and their relationship evolves from allies to lovers.

When Attila is asked to be an expert witness in a court case involving a woman from Sierra Leone accused of arson, he begins to re-evaluate the causal links between suffering and trauma, and starts to question the nature of happiness itself.

Forna has explored war and its aftermath before, most notably in her memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, which centered on her father’s execution for false charges of treason during the civil war in Sierra Leone. Happiness is a different kind of book—less dramatic, but with the delicacy and strength of a spider’s web. An understated but piercing narrative of great compassion, Happiness trades action for a thoughtful study of adaptability and the empathic bonds shared between humans and animals.

 

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

In Aminatta Forna’s fourth novel, Happiness, the collision of two strangers on a London bridge sets in motion a series of events involving a missing child, a mysterious court case and city-dwelling foxes.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

A trio torn apart by war

Review by Lauren Bufferd

American readers may not be familiar with the conflicting loyalties some Israeli combatants feel regarding their government’s policies; sometimes Israelis go so far as to enlist in the army and then refuse to serve.

But Sadness Is a White Bird, a lyrical debut by a rising literary star, may change that. The novel tells the story of a very young soldier who is driven to his breaking point when his friendship with Palestinian twins interferes with the expectations of country and family.

The novel begins in a jail cell just days after the narrator’s 19th birthday. Two years ago, Jonathan’s family moved to Israel, where he completed high school and readied himself for mandatory army service. As a committed Zionist, Jonathan’s ideals were shaped by his grandfather’s childhood in war-torn Salonica, Greece, and his later involvement in the early militias that led to Israeli statehood after World War II. But after meeting two Palestinian students at the University of Haifa—Laith and his sister, Nimreen—Jonathan’s hard-won perspective begins to change. His new ideals are tested when his unit is called on to protect a new settlement from protesters.

Before that day, Laith, Nimreen and Jonathan formed an inseparable trio, hitchhiking cross-country, hanging out in seaside cafes and spending more than one pot-fueled night on the beach. The friendship has an erotic edge; Jonathan finds himself attracted to both of the siblings, as much a physical attraction as a meeting of the minds fueled by the sharing of ideas, memories and poetry. The novel itself is written as a passionate letter to Laith from the imprisoned Jonathan, and is peppered with lyrics and phrases from notable Palestinian poets and filled with the urgency of a young man trying to understand where he stands.

Informed by author Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s background in Arabic literature and social activism, both of which add passion and integrity to the story, Sadness Is a White Bird is part coming-of-age tale and part unblinking observation of a political situation that continues to defy solutions, treaties or agreements.

 

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

Informed by author Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s background in Arabic literature and social activism, both of which add passion and integrity to the story, Sadness Is a White Bird is part coming-of-age tale and part unblinking observation of a political situation that continues to defy solutions, treaties or agreements.

FictionFamily SagaDebut Fiction

My mother before me

Review by Lauren Bufferd

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, February 2018

Xhenet Aliu’s bright and brash debut novel bursts forth with fearless wit and a take-no-prisoners attitude. While the story’s reluctant mothers and delinquent dads may be familiar, this is not a voice you’ve heard before.

Set in the mid-1990s in the depressed industrial town of Waterbury, Connecticut—the brass manufacturing capital of the United States, which attracted Eastern European immigrants in the 1980s and ’90s—Brass tells the story of Elsie, a waitress at the Betsy Ross Diner. Despite vague intentions to become a dental technician, Elsie is swept off her feet by a brooding Albanian cook, Bashkim, and soon becomes pregnant. Bashkim has a wife in Albania and a batch of mysterious investments that fail to provide financial stability. Although he encourages Elsie to have the child, his increasing volatility and plans to return to Albania make him an unlikely marriage prospect, and Elsie raises their daughter, Luljeta (Lulu), on her own.

Seventeen years later, Lulu receives a rejection letter from NYU and is suspended from high school for fighting on the same day. A lifetime rule-follower, Lulu figures that playing by the book hasn’t helped her much. When Lulu discovers that some of her father’s relatives are still in the area, she decides to seek out the family she’s never met.

Mother and daughter tell their stories in a series of alternating chapters, and both women share the self-deprecating wit of survivors. Elsie’s disintegrating relationship with Bashkim is juxtaposed with her gradual inclusion in Waterbury’s Albanian community (you won’t know whether to laugh or cry at her description of the world’s most depressing baby shower), while Lulu corrals a young man to help her get to Texas, where her father is rumored to live.

Exploring similar themes to Aliu’s short story collection, Domesticated Wild Things (winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize), Brass is a unique twist on a mother-daughter story as well as an immigrant’s tale, with reflections on abandonment, dreams, disappointment and the kind of resilience it takes to endure, despite all odds.

 

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

Xhenet Aliu’s bright and brash debut novel bursts forth with fearless wit and a take-no-prisoners attitude. While the story’s reluctant mothers and delinquent dads may be familiar, this is not a voice you’ve heard before.

FictionWorld FictionLiterary Fiction

Five journeys, five lives

Review by Lauren Bufferd

A State of Freedom, Neel Mukherjee’s bleak but beautifully constructed third novel, offers five loosely connected stories set in modern-day India. Five characters from diverse backgrounds experience displacement and devastation as they move from east to west, from village to city—even from life to death.

Mukherjee’s empathy for the underdog is apparent in the creation of his most resilient characters. Milly, who works as a maid, is forced to arrange her own kidnapping after her employers refuse to let her out of their house. Lakshman, whose chance encounter with a bear cub convinces him to leave his family, roams from village to village with the animal that he slowly trains to dance (though the training is extremely violent and gruesome, and may prove difficult for sensitive readers). Equally compelling is the London publisher visiting his parents in Bombay who defies strict cultural etiquette to involve himself in the personal life of the family cook, Renu. This almost comic piece, which has the domestic richness and class-consciousness of “Downton Abbey,” takes a grimmer turn when the publisher visits the village of the cook’s impoverished extended family.

With recurring characters and motifs throughout its disparate chapters, A State of Freedom echoes the structure and themes of V.S. Naipaul’s Booker Prize-winning novel, In a Free State (1971), which also focused on the international effects of political and social disruption in five distinct stories. There’s also a bit of Henry James in the discernible tensions between Old World complexity and New World innocence, as well as the interplay between real life and the ghostly realm of the dead. But this is no pastiche; Mukherjee’s depiction of social inequalities and his belief that even the lowliest person has a story to be told is very much his own.

 

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

A State of Freedom, Neel Mukherjee’s bleak but beautifully constructed third novel, offers five loosely connected stories set in modern-day India. Five characters from diverse backgrounds experience displacement and devastation as they move from east to west, from village to city—even from life to death.

FictionHistorical Fiction

An alluring tale of London past and present

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Victorian and modern-day England overlap in Michèle Robert’s The Walworth Beauty, a richly told ghost story set deep in one of London’s most historic neighborhoods and populated by an ex-policeman, a redundant academic and a mysterious landlady whose reach extends beyond the centuries.

In 1851, Joseph Benson has been employed by Henry Mayhew, the real-life documentarian of Victorian working-class life, to research the lives of prostitutes. A former policeman, Benson is familiar with life on the streets and the choices made by the working poor. But he struggles to remain impartial; it’s all too easy to give in to the women’s charms and tricks, especially when compared to his dreary home life. Professional inquiries bring him to Apricot Place and the elegant Mrs. Dulcimer, who runs a boarding house. Benson assumes it is a brothel, but quickly discovers that Mrs. Dulcimer’s life is not so easily classified.

More than a century later, Madeleine moves to Apricot Place after she is laid off from her position as an English professor. Engrossed by the old neighborhood, she wanders the streets, a modern-day flâneuse befriending the neighbors and immersing herself in the sights, sounds and smells. But the deeper she delves into her new environs, the more she senses echoes of a ghostly sort. A disturbing encounter with a widowed minister in a bar leaves her shaken. Is he stalking her, or is it something supernatural?

A novel of dual narratives always risks one being more interesting than the other, but Roberts keeps her interlocked stories in balance, perhaps because her use of sensuous detail serve both so well. Roberts, is a prolific novelist whose previous books have been nominated for the Booker Prize, is better known in the U.K. than the U.S., but The Walworth Beauty might just change that.

Victorian and modern-day England overlap in Michèle Robert’s The Walworth Beauty, a richly told ghost story set deep in one of London’s most historic neighborhoods and populated by an ex-policeman, a redundant academic and a mysterious landlady whose reach extends beyond the centuries.

FictionWorld Fiction

The unavoidable truth

Review by Lauren Bufferd

From one of Germany’s most highly regarded contemporary novelists comes a timely look at one of the most pivotal issues of our time.

Richard is a retired classics professor in Berlin. Recently widowed, Richard lives a quiet, ordered life, until he sees a group of African men staging a hunger strike in the center of town. Curious, he visits the shelter where they live and assists in German language classes. As he gets to know each man individually, he opens his home, inviting them for meals, companionship, even piano lessons. He accompanies them on routine visits to government offices. He even loans money to one of the men so that land can be purchased for family left in Ghana. Most of all, he listens when the men share their often traumatic experiences of violence back home and maritime travel from Ghana, Libya and Nigeria.

For Richard, the crisis feels personal; born in East Germany, he was an adult during reunification and imagines that his own feelings of dislocation and confusion are similar to what the men may be experiencing. He plunges into the work of finding asylum for the men—working within the twists and turns of social service bureaucracy, as well as reckoning with a range of responses of his friends, some decidedly unpleasant.

Go, Went, Gone (the title comes from verb conjugations written on a classroom wall) is about being woke—a contemporary idiom referring to how individuals become aware of what is happening in their community and, once cognizant, cannot lose that awareness. For Richard, the plight of the African refugees is something that once seen, cannot be ignored; silence would mean complicity rather than resistance.

Jenny Erpenbeck, who was also born in East Berlin, directs operas as well as writing novels. There is something both stately and dramatic about the pace of this novel, which never loses sight of either the big issues or the smaller details. Ably translated by Susan Bernofsky, Go, Went, Gone addresses this yet-unresolved crisis with both elegance and urgency.

From one of Germany’s most highly regarded contemporary novelists comes a timely look at one of the most pivotal issues of our time.

FictionWorld Fiction

Two survivors, bound by friendship and loss

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In 2016, Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien garnered international attention when Do Not Say We Have Nothing was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Now an earlier novel, Dogs at the Perimeter, will be available to American readers. A deeply moving story about the complexity and pain of survival, it confirms Thien’s place as one of the most gifted novelists writing today.

Janie, whose birth name we never know, lived in Phnom Penh with her parents and younger brother, Sopham. After the Khmer Rouge entered the city in April 1975, her father was separated from the rest of the family and Janie never saw him again. The rest of the family were sent to a forced labor camp where Janie witnessed her mother’s slow death from starvation and madness, while Sopham trained, at the age of 8, to be an interrogator for their captors.

Janie escaped by sea and was raised by a Canadian family. Decades later, she lives in Montreal with a husband and young son and a fulfilling job as a scientist. But when her colleague Hiroji Matsui returns to Cambodia to search for his missing brother, traumatic wartime memories return. After lashing out at her son, she moves into Matsui’s empty apartment to try and make sense of her past.

Hiroji’s story mirrors Janie’s; his Japanese family moved to Vancouver after World War II. His older brother, James, was working with the Red Cross in Cambodian refugee camps when he disappeared in 1975. Haunted by the loss, Matsui makes frequent trips to the area, only to come up empty-handed every time.

Thien explores the complexities of her characters and the intensity of their pain in prose that is both poetic and succinct. Janie and Hiroji are marvelous creations, and their friendship, which transcends their suffering, is movingly portrayed. This is a novel that is both heartbreaking and hopeful. With luck, all of Thien’s other novels and stories will soon be available to American readers.

In 2016, Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien garnered international attention when Do Not Say We Have Nothing was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Now an earlier novel, Dogs at the Perimeter, will be available to American readers. A deeply moving story about the complexity and pain of survival, it confirms Thien’s place as one of the most gifted novelists writing today.

FictionSpeculative Fiction

The Power

Review by Lauren Bufferd

If the best speculative fiction offers up new ways to see our culture, then Naomi Alderman’s The Power (winner of the U.K.’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction) is destined to be a classic. Imagine a world where women are physically more powerful than men. Then just when you are comfortable with that—or maybe think, hey, it’s about time—imagine everything that could go wrong.

The Power tells the disconcerting story of what occurs after a genetic mutation gives teenage girls the power of electricity. At first, they just shock each other for fun, but they quickly learn to harness it, first to protect themselves, then to maim or even kill. The power is transmitted to older women, and eventually, all baby girls are born with a so-called skein of electricity that runs beneath their collarbones like an extra muscle.

Alderman explores the power’s trajectory through the lives of three women: Roxy, the daughter of a British mobster; Margot, an American mayor with political aspirations; and finally Mother Eve. Raised in a series of foster homes, Eve, born Alison, uses the power to free herself from an abusive stepfather and reinvents herself as the charismatic matriarch of a female-centric religion. A young Nigerian photojournalist, Tunde, follows the power from country to country, risking his life and offering the important perspective of an outsider.

Speculative fiction has long been a genre where gender roles can be explored—think of The Handmaid’s Tale or even back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. But Alderman goes beyond her predecessors with a narrative that wonders how long before absolute power corrupts absolutely. Alderman is both a novelist and a co-creator of a smartphone audio adventure app called Zombies, Run!, and it may be this expertise in the world of gaming that brings such a fearlessly creative approach to her storytelling. Both a page-turning thriller and timely exploration of gender roles, censorship and repressive political regimes, The Power is a must-read for today’s times.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Naomi Alderman for The Power.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If the best speculative fiction offers up new ways to see our culture, then Naomi Alderman’s The Power (winner of the U.K.’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction) is destined to be a classic.

FictionFamily SagaDebut Fiction

Links in a chain

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The lives of four women are at the center of Molly Patterson’s super debut, Rebellion. Although the action covers multiple continents and centuries, Patterson’s tight focus on her characters offer revolutions more personal than political. Each of the main characters reject the expectations of family or society—whether it’s leaving familiar surroundings, embarking on an illicit relationship or simply confiscating a second pair of car keys after being forbidden to drive.

The novel opens in 1999, when Hazel moves into a nursing home and her daughter arrives to close up the family farmhouse in southern Illinois. The novel then shifts back to the 1890s, after Hazel’s mother, Louisa, has left her comfortable family home in Ohio to follow her husband to their new farm. Her sister, Addie, also left home, traveling to China as a missionary’s wife in the years just before the Boxer Rebellion. Fast-forward to the 20th century, and Hazel, newly widowed, is left with the farm while halfway around the world, Juanlan, a young Chinese woman, gives up her career to help care for her father and work in her family’s hotel in a provincial area of China.

Though ties of blood bind most of the women, the thematic connections are even more significant: filial duty, the lure of forbidden love and the changes wrought to the rural landscape by urban development. Hazel, Addie and Juanlan are also drawn into sexual relationships that in turn deepen friendships they have with other women.

The four strands of this novel never really come together, and despite political upheaval, what rises to the surface are the smaller moments that occur between family, lovers and friends. Yet the lack of a tidy ending is actually one of the novel’s strengths. Patterson creates intimate moments that are moving but not manipulative. By not connecting all the dots, she allows her readers to bond more deeply with her characters in this refreshingly unsentimental historical novel.

The lives of four women are at the center of Molly Patterson’s super debut, Rebellion. Although the action covers multiple continents and centuries, Patterson’s tight focus on her characters offer revolutions more personal than political.

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

Home Fire

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In a startlingly relevant update, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire relocates Sophocles’ Antigone to present-day London and weaves a timely tale of two British Muslim families with differing ideas about bigotry, belief and loyalty.

After years of devoting herself to raising her younger siblings, Isma Pasha is free to return to college and complete her degree in sociology. She worries about leaving behind her beautiful, headstrong sister, Aneeka, but of even more concern is Aneeka’s twin brother, Parvaiz, who has disappeared. Parvaiz surfaces in Syria, pursuing the dreams of Adil Pasha, the jihadist father he barely knew. The two sisters are devastated by his choice and frightened by the intrusion of the British Security Service into their lives.

When Isma meets handsome Eamonn Lone in the college coffee shop, she recognizes him as the son of controversial political figure Karamat Lone, who was a member of Parliament at the time of Adil’s death and is now British Home Secretary. But it is Aneeka who sees in Eamonn a unique chance to get her brother home and starts an intimate relationship with him. Is it love? Or simply political manipulation?

Home Fire is Shamsie’s seventh and most accomplished novel. The emotionally compelling plot is well served by her lucid storytelling, and she digs into complex issues with confidence. Divided into five sections, one for each of the main characters, the narrative combines the themes of Sophocles’ tragedy with this most up-to-date of stories. As this deftly constructed page-turner moves swiftly toward its inevitable conclusion, it forces questions about what sacrifice you would make for family, for love.

Read our Q&A with Kamila Shamsie for Home Fire.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, August 2017
FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Rituals of the rich

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Two wealthy families, the Hillsingers and the Quicks, have shared the remote Maine island of Seven for generations. Though Jim Hillsinger and Billy Quick are married to sisters, the families aren’t close; in fact, each family views the other as an interloper. But events conspire to draw the families together over the course of three summer days in We Shall Not All Sleep, an unusual and ambitious debut by playwright Estep Nagy.

The date is 1964, and the occasion is “the Migration,” a celebration of the annual departure of the sheep of Seven to a neighboring island. The Hillsingers and the Quicks are there for the summer with their extended families and friends; the young cousins are running wild and the servants are busy preparing for the festivities. Jim has just been ousted by the CIA for reasons that have something to do with the untimely death of Billy’s wife, Hannah, and a financial connection both families had with a mysterious Soviet agent. Grieving her sister’s death, Jim’s wife, Lila, has been spending more time with the Quicks, leading to an intimacy with Billy and a newfound closeness with her nieces. With the adults thus occupied, the Hillsinger’s older son, James, is free to lead his cousins in a series of grotesquely violent games. Most disturbingly, the youngest Hillsinger son, 12-year-old Catta, is banished overnight to the wild, uninhabited island of Baffin in Grandfather Hillsinger’s attempt to, in his words, make a man of him.

It is Catta’s story that makes this difficult novel—with its echoes of Graham Greene and Lord of the Flies—worth reading. The brutal rite of passage undertaken by the young boy is powerfully written; the clarity of his fight against the elements at odds with the complex and often puzzling Cold War politics and the unsavory exploits of the adults. It is Catta’s bravery, resourcefulness and sense of betrayal that the reader will recall long after this portrait of a dissolving privileged class has faded.

Two wealthy families, the Hillsingers and the Quicks, have shared the remote Maine island of Seven for generations. Though Jim Hillsinger and Billy Quick are married to sisters, the families aren’t close; in fact, each family views the other as an interloper. But events conspire to draw the families together over the course of three summer days in We Shall Not All Sleep, an unusual and ambitious debut by playwright Estep Nagy.

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