Maude McDaniel

Kate Atkinson’s remarkable, and vastly enjoyable, new novel requires a reader on ball bearings—someone capable of turning with every plot variation and yet able to stay balanced through the incredible twists that must occur when a fictional character takes a dozen or so chances to get life right.

We have all read books about going back in time, but in Life After Life, time finally catches up with Ursula, the English schoolgirl who relives her life over and over, both in England and in Nazi Germany, mostly during the Second World War. Each variation may constitute her best shot yet (or not), no matter how many times she has to repeat it. And every time you think, by golly, she’s got it—the author knows better.

Plot summation here is difficult, because it changes at the drop of a bomb. (And incidentally, the descriptions of the London Blitz are the best—the most realistic—that this reader has ever read, bringing home the horrifying details of death out of the sky as nothing else in fiction has before.) One might think that Atkinson’s technique of ending Ursula’s story and then starting it over would be too confusing or tedious to stay with very long, but no such thing happens. The cast of characters varies slightly from existence to existence, and the alternate histories with a multitude of endings cast their own spell. Still, it helps that most characters stay dependably the same; there are slight variations in individual personalities, but the main individuals stay fairly faithful to their past and future personas. It’s the events that vary.

Edinburgh author Atkinson has won Britain’s Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and has published a collection of short stories and seven previous novels, four of them starring Jackson Brodie, a former police inspector turned private investigator. She deals with harder questions here (“what if there was no demonstrable reality?”) and arrives at few general answers—but the process and the plotline are gripping.

You might think that humor wouldn’t fit in such a scenario, but Atkinson’s very dry, very British wit adds to the story without interfering with its serious trajectory. Darkness so often descends—but life goes on. Which may or may not be comforting, but surely forms the premise of an absorbing novel you will want to finish before the next darkness descends.

We knew of them at the time, but we did not know them for what they were—acts of national ruthlessness for which Pearl Harbor was no excuse. Only popular hysteria explains the banishment of more than 20,000 Japanese-Canadians (and more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans) to detention camps during World War ll.

Requiem covers this shameful chapter in North American history with clear-eyed historical accuracy. Forcibly removed to transport boats, young Bin Okuma and his family watch helplessly as their former neighbors loot their homes. One hundred miles from the “Protected Zone,” they are dumped on unsettled lands and forced to fend for themselves until the end of the war. It is here that Bin’s “First Father” gives him away to another man who has no son.

Fifty-some years later, Bin Okuma impulsively takes off with his dog Basil (a welcome light note) to revisit the location of his five-year detention, and to deal with the unspoken issues of his boyhood. His adoptive father Okuma-san is gone, but his First Father is still alive. At the abandoned camp, they meet again, and pride crumbles beneath the shared need of their relationship.

Frances Itani, a prizewinner for her previous book, Deafening, writes with a delicate grasp of both the obvious and the unspoken, using ordinary words charged with extraordinary meaning to produce a serious book that nevertheless invites you to keep reading past midnight. In the end, Requiem promises healing out of drowning hopelessness.

No one can find the fun in human dynamics like Clyde Edgerton, the author of such keenly observed Southern romps as Raney and The Bible Salesman. Here, that fun accompanies a darker plot about the uneasy interplay of the races in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the story, the black-and-white reverberations thump deep down underneath like a jazz beat, with a riff of humor on top.

Dwayne Hallston and Larry Lime Nolan live in small-town Starke, North Carolina, in the 1960s, an unlikely region and time for race differences to take second place to anything else. Yet unaccountably, they mostly fade away in the boys’ mutual love of jazz. Larry, who is black, takes jazz lessons from a local musician, aiming to play the piano like Thelonious Monk. Dwayne, who is white, dreams of reprising the music of James Brown’s Live at the Apollo album with his own band, The Amazing Rumblers.

Edgerton’s humor lurks in turns of phrase as much as in incidents. (Larry’s little dog was tired because “he’d got to staying gone lately.”) He doesn’t make the mistake of mocking any of his characters. His one potential villain, Mr. Fitzsimmons, is more of a devil ex machina, who, like the KKK, gets almost imperceptibly weaker as time passes.

Aunt Marzie, keeper of the unwritten archives of the black community, is the source of much of the humor—with anecdotes like the story of the woman who was so thrifty with paper towels that she was able to will half a roll to a relative. Marzie also provides grand names to newborns (“Sunshine Booming Out Of Darkness and Sorrow Benjamin,” called “Sunny Boom Ben” for short). She’s the link between the past—the “few years of sunshine when good things happened” after the Civil War—the uneasy present and the inconceivable future.

Edgerton, an ardent jazz fan and performer himself, is uniquely equipped to render jazz on paper. He makes its appeal across racial lines unmistakable and sketches in its promise for the future.

Ending with at least a temporary resolution between black and white, the beat of The Night Train offers a hint of eventual reconciliation even beyond, perhaps, the transcendent service of music itself.