Lauren Bufferd

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.

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.

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