Stephenie Harrison

FictionFamily Saga

The Color of Air

Review by Stephenie Harrison

In Gail Tsukiyama’s eighth novel, a small Japanese community on Hawaii’s Big Island is thrown into chaos in 1935 when the town’s golden boy, Daniel Abe, returns home after several years away on the mainland. His homecoming coincides with the eruption of Mauna Loa, a portentous omen, as the locals have long viewed its seismic activity as the manifestation of the mercurial moods of Pele, the goddess of volcanoes and fire and the creator of the Hawaiian Islands.

As Daniel works to resettle into his former home and make peace with a tragedy that occurred while working as a doctor in Chicago, dormant secrets and sins of the past come bubbling up. Tensions rise further when he and the villagers learn that the lava flow from Mauna Loa is headed directly for them.

With The Color of Air, Tsukiyama revisits themes that have been constant over the course of her 20-year career, tenderly exploring the complicated web of family and the resilient nature of the human spirit, while also shedding light on an important period of Asian history, this time the indentured servitude of Asian people on the sugar plantations that were once Hawaii’s lifeblood. As always, Tsukiyama’s storytelling is deeply compassionate, undoubtedly buoyed by her personal ties to the material (her father was Japanese American by way of Hawaii), which lends a quiet and sincere intimacy to the proceedings.

There is plenty of interpersonal drama in this twisting tale of love and loss, but the novel’s true joy and beauty come from the intensely atmospheric writing. Tsukiyama’s prose is lush and sensual, fully immersing the reader in this pocket of paradise and bringing the island’s spirits to life. She elevates Hawaii from a simple setting to a character as dynamic and vital as its human inhabitants.

An intoxicating blend of historical events and fiction, The Color of Air is a richly rewarding reading experience perfect for fans of Lisa See or Isabel Allende, or anyone looking for a magical love story that transcends time.

An intoxicating blend of historical events and fiction, The Color of Air is a richly rewarding reading experience perfect for fans of Lisa See or Isabel Allende, or anyone looking for a magical love story that transcends time.

FictionComing of Age

The Knockout Queen

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Rufi Thorpe has made a name for herself as a heavyweight in the literary world with her incisive, morally complex coming-of-age stories. Her debut novel, The Girls From Corona del Mar, was long-listed for several major literary prizes in 2014, and her follow-up, Dear Fang, With Love, was published to wide acclaim two years later. Now Thorpe comes back swinging with her best novel yet, a darkly comedic and tragic tale of a friendship between two outsiders.

Set in sunny Southern California, The Knockout Queen is narrated by Michael, a closeted gay teen sent to live with his aunt after his mother is sentenced to prison for stabbing Michael’s father following one of the father’s violent outbursts. With long hair, a nose piercing and a penchant for eyeliner, Michael doesn’t fit neatly into the glossy world of his suburban North Shore neighborhood. Then again, neither does his next-door neighbor, Bunny, infamous for her dead mother and her extremely tall height.

Thrown together by proximity and a shared sense of alienation, Michael and Bunny forge a fierce friendship and navigate their early high school years as an inseparable duo. Bonded by a mutual love of drag queens and a keen understanding of what it means to be rejected and relegated to the fringes, the two are ferociously protective of each other, and their love for one another is unconditional—or so Michael thinks, until a shocking act of violence triggers a devastating sequence of events that tests the limits of their friendship and changes the trajectory of their lives.

From the very start, the story is infused with an unsettling sense of menace, which Thorpe skillfully wields to pierce through the veneer of her shiny California setting to honestly examine weighty topics such as friendship, sexuality, identity and belonging. Michael tends to see things in black and white, but the canvas of Thorpe’s novel is textured with shades of gray, its world morally ambiguous.

With charismatic characters and a surprising and devastating storyline, The Knockout Queen is a moody and mordantly funny contemplation of the rigors of growing up that will leave readers reeling.

Rufi Thorpe comes back swinging with her best novel yet, a darkly comedic and tragic tale of a friendship between two outsiders.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Real Life

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Dispensing with Midwestern niceties and Southern platitudes, Brandon Taylor announces his arrival to readers with Real Life, a devastating wallop of a debut novel.

Impressive in its economy, the novel spans the course of a single weekend in the life of Wallace, a black graduate student who has moved from Alabama to a Midwestern university town. While navigating his simmering feelings of alienation and his inability to reconcile past wounds, Wallace reaches a boiling point amid conflicts and confrontations with colleagues and friends, as well as an unsettling sexual relationship with a former frenemy. As Wallace’s carefully constructed barriers begin to crumble, he spirals into hyper-intellectual ruminations on topics such as grief, privilege, racism, trauma, queer sexuality, violence, academia and the messy ways in which they all mix.

These heavy, uncomfortable topics make for a heavy, uncomfortable reading experience, one that shares more than a few similarities with Hanya Yanagihara’s juggernaut, A Little Life, both in terms of subject matter and tone. But while A Little Life could be unnecessarily grim and upsetting, the discomfort of Real Life has a point: to unsettle, to provoke and, hopefully, to cause white readers to reassess their own privilege and biases.

The discomfort of 'Real Life' has a point: to unsettle, to provoke and, hopefully, to cause white readers to reassess their own privilege and biases.

As Wallace reflects on a rather disastrous dinner party, “This is why he keeps the truth to himself, because other people don’t know what to do with your shit, with the reality of other people’s feelings. They don’t know what to do when they’ve heard something that does not align with their own perception of things. There is a pause. And a silence.” Taylor isn’t serving up pablum here but cold hard truths, and the reader's job is to witness.

Real Life will undoubtedly unsettle some readers, but it will do the opposite for others, offering relief and validation at finally having their own experiences and truths recognized and reflected in a novel, and artfully so. Taylor’s language is breathtaking in its precision and poetry, and he has a real talent for writing beautifully about ugly, brutal things. The result is a book that can only be described as the perfect union of the two—brutiful—and should be considered essential reading for all.

Dispensing with Midwestern niceties and Southern platitudes, Brandon Taylor announces his arrival to readers with Real Life, a devastating wallop of a debut novel.

FictionFamily Saga

Celestial Bodies

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Jokha Alharthi makes her American debut with Celestial Bodies, the first book by an Omani woman to be translated into English and the first novel originally written in Arabic to win the coveted Man Booker International Prize.

Although it’s framed as a novel that tracks the lives of three sisters, each navigating love and marriage within Oman’s rapidly evolving society, Celestial Bodies is far from a Middle Eastern Pride & Prejudice. Complex and challenging, Alharthi’s novel is less interested in chasing happily ever afters than in exploring Oman’s history of slavery, its cultural and class dynamics and the power of its women within a shifting but resolute patriarchy.

Celestial Bodies is comprised of nonlinear vignettes that highlight a dizzying number of members from a sprawling Omani family over the course of multiple generations. (The family tree at the book’s beginning is critical.) Each character is often given only a few pages—just enough to reveal some tantalizing or illuminating tidbit—before we are whisked on to someone else. Readers will have to work to assemble a cohesive portrait from the beautifully rendered puzzle pieces that Alharthi has scattered before them, but their efforts will be rewarded with a deeply immersive and enlightening reading experience.

The fragmented narrative and lack of obvious plot will not be for everyone, but the novel’s structure emphasizes the immutable passage of time and the changes that have transformed Oman over the last century. These changes are as unsettling for some of the characters as they are for the reader.

We read some books in order to peek into cultures and lives other than our own; others we read to better understand ourselves. Fascinating in its depiction of Oman and its intricacies, yet generous and sweeping in its humanity, Celestial Bodies offers its readers the rare opportunity to do both.

Jokha Alharthi makes her American debut with Celestial Bodies, the first book by an Omani woman to be translated into English and the first novel originally written in Arabic to win the coveted Man Booker International Prize.

FictionPopular Fiction

The Braid

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Already a national bestseller in the author’s native France, The Braid marks director and screenwriter Laetitia Colombani’s North American debut. Tender yet provocative, it’s a captivating and compassionate exploration of the lives and situations of three very different women separated by social class, work, culture and geography.

In India, Smita makes her living cleaning out her neighbors’ toilets by hand, while determined that her daughter will not share the same fate. In Sicily, Giulia must take over her family’s wig workshop and fight to innovate it for the 21st century after a tragedy befalls her father. Finally, there is Sarah, a high-powered lawyer and single mother whose cancer diagnosis has her fighting not only for her life but for her position at her firm. Much like the hairstyle from which the novel takes its title, each woman’s story is told separately and is seemingly unconnected to the other two, loosely paralleling one another until the very end, when their interconnectedness becomes apparent and all strands of the story flow into one.

One of the greatest challenges for novels with multiple narratives is that it’s rare for all storylines and characters to be equally compelling. The Braid suffers no such issue; each heroine shines when she is the focus, each plight feels urgent, vital and interesting. Colombani’s cinematic background serves her well as the plot moves swiftly through succinct and surprising vignettes. Readers will race to see how (or if) each woman will overcome the considerable obstacles she faces and how their lives will ultimately intertwine. Colombani’s writing is earnest and unobtrusive, and her words are largely in service of keeping the story humming along, with the occasional poetic flourish. There is none of the awkwardness that can sometimes stymie literature in translation.

A soul-expanding novel of hope and resiliency, The Braid is a celebration of womanhood, connection and the power of perseverance. It would make an excellent choice for book clubs or readers looking for a short but powerful read.

A soul-expanding novel of hope and resiliency, The Braid is a celebration of womanhood, connection and the power of perseverance.

FictionLiterary Fiction

A Door in the Earth

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Former New York Times reporter Amy Waldman left an indelible imprint on readers with her debut, The Submission, which examined the fallout of 9/11 at Ground Zero. Eight years later, Waldman returns with an even more ambitious novel, A Door in the Earth, which proves to be as politically provocative and challenging as its predecessor.

Drawing on her years based in Afghanistan, Waldman takes readers deep into the heart of the country, transporting us to a remote and largely unremarkable village, ringed by mountains far from the ongoing military conflicts that make headlines overseas. Guiding us is Parveen Shamsa, an earnest medical anthropologist who has recently graduated from Berkley. Inspired by a fictional bestselling memoir by Dr. Gideon Crane, which shed light on the abysmal state of women’s health in Afghanistan, Parveen has left the comforts of home in California to volunteer at the women’s clinic established by Dr. Crane and to reconnect with her own Afghan heritage. 

Unfortunately, the reality of life in the village as well as increasing doubts about the veracity of Crane’s book slowly disabuse Parveen of her youthful naivety, pulling back the veil of her innocence and privilege. When American troops turn their attention to the village, also owing to Crane’s memoir, and begin to pave a road to improve access, this seemingly benign action triggers devastating results for both Parveen and the villagers.

A Door in the Earth is a deeply chilling, multifaceted examination of not just the situation in Afghanistan but also the more pernicious and complex consequences of awakening the sleeping giant that is America and receiving its attentions—whether benevolent or not. Waldman plays out Newton’s third law of motion on the human scale, demonstrating that for every action, there is always an equal and opposite reaction. As Parveen learns a little too late, “there is no such thing as an innocuous interaction: there were always repercussions, always collateral damage, for others.”

Former New York Times reporter Amy Waldman left an indelible imprint on readers with her debut, The Submission, which examined the fallout of 9/11 at Ground Zero. Eight years later, Waldman returns with an even more ambitious novel, A Door in the Earth, which…

FictionFamily Drama

Things You Save in a Fire

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Some people work to live, but Cassie Hanwell lives to work. Her job as a firefighter—and an extremely good one at that—gives her a sense of purpose that nothing else ever has. With grit and unwavering determination, Cassie has worked her way up the ranks of the Austin, Texas, fire department, earning the respect and admiration of her male colleagues. She’s even the first woman to win the department’s prestigious Valor Award. But on the evening of the award ceremony, an impulsive decision, triggered by an encounter with a blast from her past, may jeopardize everything for which Cassie has worked so hard. With her career on the line, Cassie agrees to transfer to an old-school fire department on the outskirts of Boston, where she’ll have to prove herself to her new squad, who have made it clear that there’s no room for a “lady” in their fire station. 

The only person who doesn’t ignore her or treat her with outright hostility is a fellow newcomer, known as the Rookie, who proves to be a different kind of problem—because Cassie decided a long time ago that she would never fall in love, no matter how considerate or attractive or good a cook he might be. There’s no way her career can survive another scandal, but as she spends more time with the Rookie—and begins reconnecting with her estranged mother—Cassie can’t help but wonder if she should let her past go up in flames and make room for something new.

Katherine Center’s latest novel is an emotionally resonant and deeply satisfying love story that features a resilient and courageous heroine with legitimate traumas and obstacles to overcome. Center is a pro at creating characters that readers will root for every step of the way. While Cassie’s happy ending is never truly in doubt, she puts in the work to get there, and it feels well-earned and richly rewarding. 

Hopeful and heartwarming, Things You Save in a Fire is a moving testament to the power of forgiveness and love’s ability to heal, even in the face of life’s worst tragedies.

Some people work to live, but Cassie Hanwell lives to work. Her job as a firefighter—and an extremely good one at that—gives her a sense of purpose that nothing else ever has. With grit and unwavering determination, Cassie has worked her way up the ranks of the Austin, Texas, fire department, earning the respect and admiration of her male colleagues. She’s even the first woman to win the department’s prestigious Valor Award. But on the evening of the award ceremony, an impulsive decision, triggered by an encounter with a blast from her past, may jeopardize everything for which Cassie has worked so hard. With her career on the line, Cassie agrees to transfer to an old-school fire department on the outskirts of Boston, where she’ll have to prove herself to her new squad, who have made it clear that there’s no room for a “lady” in their fire station. 

FictionComic Fiction

Evvie Drake Starts Over

Review by Stephenie Harrison

NPR pop culture correspondent Linda Holmes is an unabashed lover and ardent defender of the romantic comedy, so it’s unsurprising that her debut novel is exactly that. Evvie Drake Starts Over is a heartwarming rom-com about loss, grief and second chances.

Ever since her husband—a successful surgeon and her hometown’s golden boy—died in a car crash, Evvie Drake has been in the worst kind of rut. Everyone in her small Maine town chalks up her funk to grief, but as far as Evvie is concerned, the truth is far worse. So much worse, in fact, that Evvie can’t even bear to share it with her best friend, Andy, and has instead resigned herself to a life spent as a young widow, rattling around a house that is now far too big for her, content to lose herself in big books and watch life slowly pass her by.

Everything changes, however, when Andy suggests that Evvie rent out her home’s attached apartment to a friend who also has more than a passing familiarity with life not turning out according to plan. Dean Tenney, once one of baseball’s hottest players, is now infamous for his case of “the yips,” a baffling development that forced him into early retirement after he inexplicably lost his ability to pitch, seemingly overnight. After Dean moves in, a tentative friendship forms between the two that ultimately transitions into something more. Together, Dean and Evvie encourage one another to face their pasts and their present truths, all while discovering that even when life throws you a curveball, it’s never too late to find your happily ever after.

Despite the kernel of sadness rooted at the novel’s core, Evvie Drake Starts Over is a feel-good read that radiates warmth. Holmes nails the balance between romance and humor, with Evvie and Dean’s effortless and truly funny dialogue being a particular strength. In addition to developing their convincing relationship, Holmes spends ample time fleshing out her leads so they feel like real people with legitimate issues.

Uplifting and life-affirming, Evvie Drake Starts Over is a perfect choice for fans of Rainbow Rowell and Marian Keyes.

Read a Q&A with Linda Holmes for ‘Evvie Drake Starts Over.’

Uplifting and life-affirming, Evvie Drake Starts Over is a perfect choice for fans of Rainbow Rowell and Marian Keyes.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Rules for Visiting

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Perhaps the greatest irony of our modern era is that in a time when we appear more connected than ever, most of us have never felt more alone. Certainly this is true for May Attaway, the protagonist of Jessica Francis Kane’s meditative second novel, Rules for Visiting.

Largely preferring the company of plants to people, May is a single, middle-aged woman who lives in her childhood home with her father and cat and works as a gardener at the local university. She is the first to admit that although her world is relatively small and uneventful, the life she has cultivated for herself is a comfortable one (albeit mundane and vaguely hermitic). When she is gifted with an unanticipated month of paid vacation, May is inspired to revise her stance on relationships and broaden her horizons. Armed with little more than an Emily Post guide to etiquette, a book of quotations on friendship and a suitcase named Grendel (after the friendless monster in Beowulf), May sets out on a transformative pilgrimage to reconnect with the four women she considers her dearest friends. 

A 21st-century novel for those with old-fashioned sensibilities, Rules for Visiting is an empathetic yet enigmatic read. May’s story is not for the impatient, as the narrative perambulates through a series of discursive musings on friendship, flora, family, grief and how connections can fail or flourish in this modern age. For much of the novel, May keeps the reader at arm’s length, charming with her wry wit but using these rhetoric sleights of hand as substitutes for real understanding and intimacy. But as May becomes more comfortable with the art of connecting with the people in her life, she reveals more of her true heart to the reader as well, gradually shedding light on the trauma that led to such a closed-off life. 

Rules for Visiting takes its time to fully take root, but the end result is a sturdy novel that blossoms rather beautifully.

Perhaps the greatest irony of our modern era is that in a time when we appear more connected than ever, most of us have never felt more alone. Certainly this is true for May Attaway, the protagonist of Jessica Francis Kane’s meditative second novel, Rules for Visiting.

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Lost History of Dreams

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Following several lauded volumes of nonfiction, visual artist Kris Waldherr delivers an accomplished debut novel, The Lost History of Dreams, an atmospheric and hypnotic love story that not even death can end.

Wracked with grief over an accident that befell his wife three years previously, Robert Highstead has cut himself off from his family and turned his back on his writing, instead devoting himself to photographing the dead as one final memento for their family members. Incapacitated by sorrow, Robert remains ensconced in the past, one in which he and his wife are still madly in love with each other. But when Robert’s brother reaches out and requests that he head to the wilds of Shropshire to deliver the body of their cousin, the famed poet Hugh de Bonne, Robert finds himself powerless to refuse. Hugh’s last request was that his remains be buried beside his own wife, Ada, and that he be photographed alongside his niece and heir, Isabelle Lowell, in a dazzling glass chapel built in Ada’s memory. When Robert arrives at his cousin’s estate, however, he receives a prickly reception from Isabelle, who holds the only key to the chapel. In no uncertain terms she tells him that Hugh will never be allowed entrance to the chapel and that Robert is wasting his time. Finally the two strike a deal: Over the course of five evenings, Isabelle will relate Ada’s story, and Robert will transcribe it. Only after the story is completed will Isabelle open the chapel, and the many ghosts tethering both her and Robert to the past can finally be laid to rest.

“Love stories are ghost stories in disguise,” Isabelle warns Robert on their first evening together. The Lost History of Dreams is a sensual, twisting gothic tale that embraces Victorian superstition much in the tradition of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; the mystery is slyly developed, while the love story is tastefully titillating. 

In a novel that blurs the line between life and death, nothing can be taken for granted, and just when you think you have everything figured out, Waldherr turns the tables once again. This means that at times the narrative becomes convoluted and certain plot points don’t come to fruition, but it’s still an absorbing read.

Following several lauded volumes of nonfiction, visual artist Kris Waldherr delivers an accomplished debut novel, The Lost History of Dreams, an atmospheric and hypnotic love story that not even death can end.

FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

When You Read This

Review by Stephenie Harrison

More often than not, death is viewed as an ending rather than a beginning—but that is not the case in Mary Adkins’ delightful debut novel, When You Read This, in which a young woman’s death proves to be the catalyst for a compassionate and heartwarming love story.

When Iris Massey is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in her early 30s, she turns to blogging as a way to help come to terms with her illness and immortalize a sliver of her soul through memories and drawings. Before she dies, she prints out a copy and leaves it behind with instructions for her boss, Smith, to get the manuscript published if he can. Smith wants to honor Iris’ memory and her last wishes, but when he reaches out to her sister, Jade, about how to proceed, she tells him in no uncertain terms to drop it. Despite the hostile tone of Jade’s initial messages, the gaping Iris-shaped hole in both Smith’s and Jade’s lives ultimately forms a bridge between them. Through emails, texts, therapy transcripts, blog posts, order confirmations and more, readers witness as shared grief paves the way for discussions of other touchstones of loss and disappointment, sparking a deeper connection that neither character was looking for but can’t be denied.

An epistolary novel for the 21st century, When You Read This sparkles with a perfect blend of humor, pathos and romance. At times painfully sad, the novel balances Jade and Smith’s anguish so that it is palpable but never overwrought, and moments of levity and whimsy keep the tale from becoming maudlin or cloyingly sentimental. Adkins has managed to paint an authentic and nuanced portrait of grief and the various ways people attempt to cope and continue on with life when the worst has happened. 

Inventive and irresistible, When You Read This is a tender and uplifting story about love, loss and the resilience of the human heart that will have you laughing and crying in equal turns.

 

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

More often than not, death is viewed as an ending rather than a beginning—but that is not the case in Mary Adkins’ delightful debut novel, When You Read This, in which a young woman’s death proves to be the catalyst for a compassionate and heartwarming love story.

FictionWorld Fiction

An Orchestra of Minorities

Review by Stephenie Harrison

BookPage starred review, January 2019

After making an international splash with his 2015 debut, The Fishermen, and receiving a nomination for the Man Booker prize, Chigozie Obioma returns with an engrossing new epic. In An Orchestra of Minorities, Obioma blends the folklore of his country’s Igbo people with the narrative framework of Homer’s Greek classic The Odyssey to produce a multicultural fable that heralds a new master of magical realism.

Set in southeastern Nigeria, An Orchestra of Minorities tells the story of Chinonso, a lonely and humble poultry farmer who makes the mistake of falling in love with the wrong woman, one who enjoys a much more privileged socioeconomic status and background than himself. Unnerved by her family’s strenuous objections to their match, Chinonso sells all his worldly possessions and travels overseas in order to secure an education, prove his worth and gain their approval to marry. Alas, misfortune plagues Chinonso as soon as he departs from Nigeria, and the fate that once drew the two lovers together now seems determined to keep them apart and break Chinonso’s spirit in the process.

After enduring much hardship and many years away in Cyprus, Chinonso returns home to discover that the only woman he has ever loved is perhaps even further out of reach than before, and he may also have lost the man that he once was during his time away.

It’s a special writer who can take the familiar tropes found within An Orchestra of Minorities and infuse them with new life, transforming them into something exciting and unexpected. Happily, Obioma is exactly such an author. Not only does the Nigerian backdrop add depth and interest to the tale, but the story itself is told from the perspective of Chinonso’s chi, a protector from the spirit realm who weaves in Igbo mythology and guides the narrative through both mortal and metaphysical dimensions, resulting in a unique and unforgettable reading experience.

Written in lambent prose and ambitious in scope, An Orchestra of Minorities is no fairy tale, but rather a tragic masterpiece.

 

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

After making an international splash with his 2015 debut, The Fishermen, and receiving a nomination for the Man Booker prize, Chigozie Obioma returns with an engrossing new epic. In An Orchestra of Minorities, Obioma blends the folklore of his country’s Igbo people with the narrative framework of Homer’s Greek classic The Odyssey to produce a multicultural fable that heralds a new master of magical realism.

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Conventional wisdom cautions, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but thankfully, author Stuart Turton must not have gotten the memo. His debut novel, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, is a daring and wildly imaginative spin on the tried, tested and true English manor house murder mystery trope that manages to be both comfortingly familiar and absolutely unlike anything readers have ever encountered before.

Turton’s devilishly devious debut opens in a forest with our protagonist screaming the name Anna. With his next inhalation, he realizes that not only does he have no idea who Anna is, but he also has no memory of anything at all—including his own identity. As he struggles to make his way out of the forest, a shot rings out, and a woman appears to be killed before his very eyes. In a panic, he manages to make his way to the foreboding and elegantly decaying estate of Blackheath in search of assistance. However, our narrator eventually comes to realize that the forest murder is but the first of many, and that solving this crime is not his ultimate objective. Rather, a mysterious masked man informs him that beautiful heiress Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed that night, and it is up to the protagonist to figure out who committed the crime. If he fails to uncover the killer before the day is done, he’ll wake up in a different guest’s body to relive the day and try again. After the eighth day, his memory will be wiped clean, and he’ll start the cycle all over again. Only when the murderer is unmasked will Blackheath release its hold on our dilettante detective and allow him to leave the grounds for good.

Blending elements from Quantum Leap, Groundhog Day and Clue, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle turns the conventional murder mystery novel on its head while simultaneously elevating the genre to new, exhilarating heights. Turton has crafted a dizzying game of cat and mouse that will keep readers on their toes as they attempt to keep up with the various loops through time and make sense of all the clues that are scattered by the various hosts over the course of the day. Initially the reader’s confusion mirrors that of the narrator, but this only increases the reader’s sense of satisfaction when the many pieces of Turton’s complex puzzle begin to slot into pace and all is made clear.

An intellectual thriller that would likely stump the likes of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a must-read for any reader wishing to give their little gray cells a workout.

Conventional wisdom cautions, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but thankfully, author Stuart Turton must not have gotten the memo. His debut novel, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, is a daring and wildly imaginative spin on the tried, tested and true English manor house murder mystery trope that manages to be both comfortingly familiar and absolutely unlike anything readers have ever encountered before.

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