Thane Tierney

FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Bishop’s Villa

Review by Thane Tierney

It might seem simple, sitting on the couch with Netflix on and your belly full, to envision the heroics you’d accomplish if war broke out in your homeland: You’d join the armed forces, or whatever constituted the resistance. You’d break the chains of your oppressors, just like Star Wars, or go rogue, living off your wits and aiding the forces of good, just like Mad Max. Of course you would. Of course you would. 

But life isn’t a Hollywood movie, and as the real stories of World War II are lost to living memory, it takes someone with a sharp eye and an emotionally perceptive heart to bring the nuance of enduring an occupation into focus. Italian author Sacha Naspini has done so triumphantly in his second novel to be translated into English, The Bishop’s Villa. Naspini is from Grosseto, a town in southern Tuscany that holds a dubious distinction: It was Europe’s only Catholic diocese to have been rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust. For eight months toward the end of the war in the European theater, the Roccatederighi seminary housed about 100 Jews, many of whom were sent on to Auschwitz. 

The Bishop’s Villa’s fictional protagonist, who stands in for everyman, is a cobbler in Grosseto named René. It’s not his war; he’s just trying to keep his head down and make it through, like most of the townsfolk. But when his friend (and unrequited love) Anna flees to join the resistance, his relationship with her lands him in hot water with the local collaborators, and he finds himself an unwilling “guest” at the bishop’s villa. Though he’s beaten and interrogated, René holds out hope. “What,” he reflects, “can you do to a man who looks at you calmly when you threaten him with death? You can chew his bones clean, but you can’t touch his soul, which means you will never win.”

René’s gut-wrenching story of survival caroms between moments of unexpected kindness and unfathomable cruelty as the final days of the war play out. Naspini is to be commended for helping us to recall a story that played out thousands of times across a continent, a scenario that we dare not forget lest it be repeated. 

Sacha Naspini’s The Bishop’s Villa is a gut-wrenching story of survival set in Grosseto, a Catholic diocese in Tuscany which was rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Precipice

Review by Thane Tierney

It’s probably manageable if the leader of the free world goes off the deep end, or if the continent that drives the world’s economy loses its collective mind . . . unless both things happen at the same time. In 1914, at the beginning of Robert Harris’ latest novel, Precipice, the stars align to create a war so horrific in its size and scope that it would later (wrongly, as it turned out) be called “the war to end all wars.” Meanwhile, British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith has fallen head over heels for Venetia Stanley, an aristocrat 35 years his junior.

Did we mention he is married?

It should be also said at this juncture that, while Precipice is a work of fiction, virtually all of the characters are real, as is the correspondence from the PM to his inamorata. In fact, the letters (which she saved) provide some of the only historical insight into meetings that determined Britain’s decision to involve itself in the continental conflagration. The lone fictional character, a Scotland Yard Special Branch officer named Paul Deemer, has been tasked with monitoring what, if any, secrets are being spilled in the lovebirds’ copious correspondence (Asquith wrote to Venetia as many as three times a day).

Harris steers the reader through the slalom course of this ill-fated love story, set against the backdrop of the war’s more consequential casualties. His supporting cast, ripped right out of the society pages, includes the ruthlessly ambitious David Lloyd George, who would succeed Asquith as PM; the poet Rupert Brooke, who is enamored of Asquith’s daughter; Winston Churchill, whose hubris led to disaster at Gallipoli; and King Edward VII, who had somewhat scandalously anointed Asquith as PM in Biarritz, France, rather than on British soil.

Harris’ ear for language is keen, capturing both Britain’s elite and hoi polloi with effortless grace. Of course, he is aided by Asquith’s actual words, quoted from one of the avalanche of love letters: “Do you know how much I love you? No? Just try to multiply the stars by the sands.” Certainly more poetic than Charles’ phone calls to Camilla, though every bit as moonstruck.

Despite the fact that anyone acquainted with modern British history already knows the outcome of the story (spoiler alert: we won the war), Harris’ skill keeps the action taut and the reader focused. And the novel echoes a much older bit of classical English political fiction: As Shakespeare said, the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Robert Harris’ Precipice dramatizes a real-life scandal: On the eve of World War I, the British prime minister engaged in a national security-jeopardizing love affair.
FictionShort StoriesSatireLiterary Fiction

Rejection

Review by Thane Tierney

Rejection: Somewhere on the continuum between a casual date rebuff and a duo-destroying divorce, we’ve all experienced it. In Rejection, Whiting and O. Henry Award-winning author Tony Tulathimutte raises the experience to an art form. In seven connected stories, he chronicles several characters’ vivid responses to being turned down, or turned away. 

By vivid, I mean frequently TMI-delivering. Colorful descriptions of body parts and the multiple ways they can interact tumble off the page, and if depictions of sadism and ersatz semen (complete with a recipe) are off-putting, you might consider something more PG. On the other hand, if you can roll with the aforementioned, the book is frequently downright hilarious. 

In one story, the protagonist is a cartoonishly hyperactive tech bro, whose latest invention is living room furniture that also functions as workout equipment, allowing the user to crush out 300-pound leg presses. (Unfortunately, his team hasn’t yet worked out the “stinky/soggy upholstery” problem.) In another chapter, Tulathimutte documents a multi-hour consensus meeting in a university’s “queer-friendly vegetarian-friendly 420-friendly co-op,” weaponizing and satirizing political correctness in extremis. 

As one might expect from a graduate of both Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tulathimutte has a facility with verbal stunt-piloting that at times borders on the dazzling. Not every writer can pull off a sentence like this one, describing social media as “the give-and-take of giving takes where no one could take what they’d give.” The structure of Rejection is distinctive as well, riddled with group text messages, acronyms and the jargon of those raised with the internet. Pro tip; Boomers and Gen Xers might want to keep a browser tab open to Urban Dictionary for easy reference.  

Right at the end, Tulathimutte throws one last curveball reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, a little literary Ouroboros that may cause the reader to question the legitimacy of the entire narrative that precedes it. Clever trick, that, in a clever book aimed at clever readers. 

Tony Tulathimutte’s facility with verbal stunt-piloting borders on the dazzling in Rejection, a novel in seven stories that chronicles vivid responses to the experience of being turned down, or turned away.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

There Are Rivers in the Sky

Review by Thane Tierney

Water. Generally, we don’t give it much of a thought. Unless there’s too little . . . or too much. Then it fills our consciousness, saturating our brains with phrases like “atmospheric rivers” and “glacial retreat,” or such devastatingly commonplace words as “drowning” and “drought.”

In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, here on the head of a learned and cruel Assyrian king, there as a snowflake on the tongue of an impoverished British baby, and yet again as a lifesaving elixir in the possession of a Yazidi grandmother driven into exile by the Islamic State group.

In a fabulist twist, the Booker-shortlisted, bestselling author imbues this recurring molecule with a sense of memory. After a particularly disturbing and graphic passage near the book’s opening, Shafak states her case clearly and succinctly: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

The book opens with King Ashurbanipal in the 640s B.C.E.; then the narrative takes a leap of thousands of years and miles, to Victorian era London. There, a young lad born to an itinerant scavenger is crowned “King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums.” Modeled on real-life Assyriologist George Smith, Arthur rises above his station to become a scholar who, like Ashurbanipal before him, is enchanted by the Epic of Gilgamesh.

From there, the scene shifts to 2014, by the Tigris river in southeastern Turkey. There, Narin, a young Yazidi girl, is preparing for a journey to Iraq with her grandmother so that she can be baptized in a sacred temple. When the girl questions her elder about why they are being forced from their land, the grandmother recounts a brief history of the Yazidi people, concluding that “For us, memory is all we have. If you want to know who you are, you need to learn the stories of your ancestors.”

Shafak seems to be on a mission to prevent us from forgetting, whether it’s the majesty of ancient Mesopotamia, the horrific crimes against humanity perpetrated upon the Yazidis, or the fragile ecosystem of rivers such as the Tigris and the Thames. Like water itself, There Are Rivers in the Sky seeps into the cracks and crevasses of our humanity, unlocking a sense of wonder.

In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, touching four lives linked by the Epic of Gilgamesh.
FictionLiterary FictionDystopian Fiction

Hum

Review by Thane Tierney

When it comes to dystopian futures, author Helen Phillips hits the American zeitgeist jackpot in her sixth novel, Hum. Cancel culture, job displacement due to AI, government overreach, deteriorating middle class wealth, missing children, declining air quality, bad breakfast cereals . . . the future’s so dark, you gotta wear a miner’s helmet.

In fiction, a trip out into nature almost always ends up with Job-like trials being visited upon the vacationers. Deliverance. 127 Hours. Jurassic Park. Into The Wild. Even Hansel and Gretel, for goodness’ sake. But despite these fictional precedents, when May makes a little extra money by submitting herself as a test subject for a surgical procedure that will disguise her features from the latest iteration of AI recognition software, she decides to take her family on vacation to the very expensive hyper-natural Botanical Garden. May hauls her two kids and her husband off into this Disney-fied paradise, requiring them, for good measure, to leave their phones and other communication devices at home so they can reap the full benefit of the experience.

And reap it they do.

The “hum” of the title is an AI-powered, jack-of-all-trades android, able to fill roles from a dental hygienist to a pop psychotherapist. If there was any question as to whether Phillips has seen 20 minutes into the future, in addition to dispensing whatever wisdom is appropriate to the moment, hums shill commercial products—unless you upgrade to the ad-free tier. Hum is, as dystopias go, reasonably breezy; it’s suitable for a coast-to-coast airline flight or an extended stay on the beach as an antidote to binge-watching the latest season of your favorite TV show. For those just dipping their toes into speculative fiction, the setting is relatable enough to not make you feel like (ahem) a stranger in a strange land.

For those just dipping their toes into speculative fiction, Helen Phillips’ prescient dystopia Hum is relatable enough not to make you feel like a stranger in a strange land.
FictionPopular FictionComing of Age

Humor Me

Review by Thane Tierney

The British poet Philip Larkin once famously opined that parents “fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” Protagonist Presley Fry in Cat Shook’s sophomore novel, Humor Me, could find many faults with her alcoholic mother and their toxic relationship. But after suddenly losing her, 20-something Presley is a bit of an emotional wreck. 

On the surface, it would seem that Presley’s well on her way to having it all: After moving from a small town in Georgia to New York City, she’s landed a gig as a production assistant on Gary Madden’s Late Night Show, with a supportive boss and an imminent promotion to talent booker. Like many city-dwelling professionals her age, Presley has a roommate, Izzy, who acts by turns as agony aunt and partner in crime. 

Much like the women of Sex and the City—she identifies as a Miranda—Presley breezes through a frothy sequence of confusing connections with near-boyfriends, drinks with gal pals at local nightspots and career-enhancing forays into the lower rungs of the entertainment industry, where she hopes to discover the unpolished gem upon whom she can hitch her own star. But the specter of her late mother haunts her at every step. 

And Presley is not the only one mourning her mother’s death. Susan Clark, her mother’s childhood best friend, is also working through her grief, with a side of distress over her wealthy and influential husband having been named in a #MeToo-era sexual misconduct scandal. After a couple of semi-awkward interactions (which seem to be the only type of interaction Presley has), Susan asks to be friends, and Presley somewhat reluctantly accepts. The relationship turns out to be fortuitous for both of them: Susan gets to spoil the daughter she never had, and Presley gains some valuable insight into her mother’s formative years. 

Though it certainly has rom-com-esque appeal, Humor Me goes beyond that, navigating the complexities of breaking old patterns, forging new connections and establishing one’s identity. It’s also a bit of a love letter to the City That Never Sleeps, even if its inhabitants do, occasionally to their detriment . . . and sometimes to their delight.

Like the women of Sex and the City, Humor Me’s protagonist Presley Fry breezes through connections with near-boyfriends, drinks with gal pals and career-enhancing forays in NYC, but the specter of her late mother haunts her at every step.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

Real Americans

Review by Thane Tierney

It’s the mid-1960s, right at the start of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and the Red Guards are methodically upending—many would say demolishing—the cultural heritage of China. Books are burned, artifacts are smashed, history is erased. But two plucky biology students, Mei and Peng, are determined to rescue a lotus seed from the university library. 

This isn’t just any seed. It is a seed from thousands of years ago, allegedly dropped from the sky by a dragon as a gift for a long-ago emperor, with the power to confer a wish on its recipient.  But the emperor died before getting to make that wish. Mei, a scientist by nature, is skeptical of the legend, but she wants to protect the seed from the Red Guards, so she takes it.

Here, Rachel Khong’s multigenerational saga Real Americans splits into three narratives, following Mei, her daughter and her grandson through 60-odd tumultuous years after she immigrates to America. The narration isn’t linear; Mei, who plays the pivotal role at the book’s brief outset, largely recedes into the background until the final third of the book, when, as an elderly retired geneticist, she reflects on her life choices and how they have affected her family: “Aren’t we lucky? Our DNA encodes for innumerable possible people, and yet it’s you and I who are here. . . . In this place, on this small blue rock, innumerable miracles: redwoods, computers, stingrays, pianos, you and me.” 

Through intervening events and discoveries, Khong implicitly asks a very pertinent question: What does it mean to be a “real American”? Is it enough to be born in the U.S.? Can you assimilate from a foreign country, a foreign culture? Is there something in our genetics that binds us inevitably to the lands of our ancestral origins? Real Americans’ answers are at once complex and compelling, as science and philosophy sit cheek by jowl with history and elements of magic. As the three narrative strands merge, their denouement is unexpected yet perhaps predestined: the fruit of a seed planted long ago. 

In Rachel Khong’s multigenerational saga, Real Americans, science and philosophy sit cheek by jowl with history and elements of magic.
FictionPoetry

Modern Poetry

Review by Thane Tierney

For a collection titled Modern Poetry, the latest offering from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss spends a fair amount of time communing with the past.

In the title poem, named after a textbook she studied in college, she reminisces about how she and her roommate referred to William Carlos Williams as “Billy C. Billygoat,” and how she managed to fake her way to an A on a paper about Wallace Stevens despite “having no clue / what he meant by ‘The deer and the dachshund are one.’” That fake-it-till-you-make-it approach has apparently served her well, because she has not only become a highly regarded poet, but also gone on to a two-decade-plus career teaching poetry to other young people with impostor syndrome.

While the spirit of the avowedly modern ‘60s poet Frank O’Hara hovered over her last collection, 2021’s frank: sonnets, which won her the Pulitzer, her guiding star for this outing is a poet who is decidedly not modern: John Keats. In fact, the final poem of the volume, “Romantic Poet,” is at once an homage to Keats and a comment on the contemporary tension between loving an artist’s work and having mixed feelings—or outright disdain—for the artist. After being told the many reasons she would not have liked the unnamed “him” at the poem’s outset, she rejoins with a simple “But the nightingale, I said.”

Ah, the nightingale, the bird that sings. Seuss’ song is not the A-B-A-B rhyme scheme that was pounded into our middle school heads. It’s more subtle, and evinces itself when read out loud. “Rhyme,” Seuss said at 2023’s Great Lakes Poetry Festival, “can just do a thing that nothing else can do; it appeals to our bodies, not our minds.”

In “Romantic Poetry,” Seuss writes, “I was twenty three when I sold off / Modern Poetry and sailed to Italy, seeking / Romantic poetry . . . and found my way to Rome, / and Keats’s death room. / His deathbed, a facsimile.” Feel it, in your body, as you read it? Twenty three, Italy, poetry, facsimile. It’s all there for the taking. To co-opt the famed slogan from the unsung McCann-Erickson ad agency poet who created it for milk, “Modern Poetry: it does a body good.”

In Modern Poetry, Diane Seuss reminisces on faking it through poetry classes in college and on the complicated legacy of John Keats.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Glorious Exploits

Review by Thane Tierney

At its heart, Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is something of a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney let’s-put-on-a-show romp . . . with a few minor, and mind-bending, exceptions. The stars are a pair of foul-mouthed unemployed potters from Syracuse, Sicily, the year is 412 BC and the acting troupe isn’t a bunch of neighborhood kids; it’s composed of Athenian prisoners of war left in a quarry to starve.

The tale’s narrator, Lampo, is a garrulous scoundrel always on the lookout for spare coin. One day, after tossing scraps of food to the Athenian prisoners in exchange for their reciting passages from Euripides, Lampo’s more taciturn friend Gelon presents him with a plan: reinvent themselves as directors, recruit the prisoners as a cast, tart up the prison quarry as their amphitheater and present two of Euripides’ plays, Medea and Trojan Women, back to back.

What could possibly go wrong? Apart, of course, from the fact that the potential audience of Syracusans hates the defeated Athenians, and that the production is to be mounted by two unemployed potters with no background in theater. Nonetheless, the show must go on; the hapless duo happens upon a mysterious benefactor who offers funds for the production, sets are built, costumes are sewn and various potentially hazardous wheels are set in motion.

At the outset of rehearsals, co-director Gelon gives his captive cast a little pep talk. He reminisces about how the Athenian tragedy Oedipus Rex sparked his fondness for the theater: “I don’t hate you. How could I? Even though I know you came to make us slaves. I can’t hate you. I believe any city that gave us those plays has something worth saving.”

If politics makes strange bedfellows, then Glorious Exploits reveals that art makes even stranger ones, as the captors and the captives pause their hostilities for the sake of a greater—if imperfect—good. Lennon’s unique voice sparkles with a darkly comic undertone in this quirkily uplifting commentary on war, art and the surprisingly resilient spirit of humanity.

Ferdia Lennon’s unique voice sparkles with a darkly comic undertone in his debut novel, Glorious Exploits, a quirkily uplifting commentary on war, art and the surprisingly resilient spirit of humanity.
FictionWesternHistorical FictionFamily Saga

The Bullet Swallower

Review by Thane Tierney

The Old Testament book of Ezekiel states that “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.” In theory, while wealth may be passed along from generation to generation, debts—even those of the karmic nature—aren’t.

Try telling that to any of the Sonoro clan, the family at the center of Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ dual-timeline magical realist tour de force, The Bullet Swallower.

Beginning with patriarch Alferez Antonio in the 1800s, the Sonoros have committed all manner of sins in the name of ambition, from running a gold mine with slave labor to robbing a train at the turn of the 20th century. When the latter goes sideways, Antonio Sonoro is shot by the Texas Rangers and left for dead in the desert. His henchman brother is killed, but Antonio survives and swears a blood oath for revenge—rechristening himself as El Tragabalas, the Bullet Swallower.

A century later, in 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico’s number one box-office draw, a much-beloved movie star and performer known as El Gallo (The Rooster). While relaxing at home after a grueling tour, he’s visited by someone whom he believes to be a fan, bearing a strange gift: an ancient volume entitled The Ignominious History of the Sonoro Family from Antiquity to the Present Day.

Ping-ponging back and forth across the decades, Gonzalez James constructs a dynastic legacy that is shrouded in mystery and carries more than a hint of danger. When Jaime tries to pry some of the family’s more recent history out of his tight-lipped father, the old man replies, “Did you ever think that the reason I never said anything about them is because it’s too painful?” And when a shadowy figure named Remedio inserts himself unexpectedly into Jaime’s household, the story takes on an element of the supernatural.

All this would be remarkable enough, but it’s made even more so by the fact that The Bullet Swallower is based, albeit loosely, on Gonzalez James’ own family history. As she puts it in the author’s note, “Everything in this book is true except for the stuff I made up.” So while the son—or in this case the great-granddaughter—may not bear the iniquity of the father, it seems she does wind up bearing witness to it.

Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ dual-timeline magical realist tour de force presents the dynastic legacy of the Sonoro family—one that is shrouded in mystery and carries more than a hint of danger.
Mystery & SuspenseNoirMysteryHistorical Mystery

Cahokia Jazz

Review by Thane Tierney

Suppose, just for a moment, that the European colonizers of America hadn’t brought a whole host of diseases that wiped out a majority of the Indigenous population, and that Natives had thrived, rather than been decimated. What would Prohibition-era America have looked like, politically, economically and culturally?

In the alt-universe police procedural mystery Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford takes this premise and runs with it. It’s as if Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle met up with Tony Hillerman’s Skinwalkers in a 1922 speakeasy. 

Apart from the setting—the state of Cahokia, carved out of eastern Missouri and surrounding states—the story starts off in familiar, if somewhat gruesome, territory. Two detectives, Joe Barrow and Phineas Drummond, are investigating a murder in which the victim has had his heart cut out. On his face, the word bashli (from Anopa, the city’s Native lingua franca, meaning hit or cut) has been scrawled in blood. 

At first, the murder seems to have possibly been some sort of Aztec ritual sacrifice, but as the investigation progresses, it’s discovered that the deceased had links to the Ku Klux Klan, who very much want to replace Cahokia’s Native power structure with one of their own. 

The book’s debt to the likes of Raymond Chandler is evident throughout, as Detective Barrow steps into the hallowed role of the untarnished, unvarnished romantic who makes his way doggedly down these mean streets. And on occasion, Spufford’s language equals that of noir masters of yore: “He had opened the box at the city’s heart, and found it contained a secret, and a dark one, a grim sacrifice, but not a snake or a scorpion, not anything beyond the reach of the hope that every morning upholds hearts and cities. And now he was free to go. The city was done with him.”

There’s a bit of a learning curve for the reader, as unfamiliar language and culture weave through the intricately plotted narrative, but Spufford propels the Jazz Age action to a climax that is at once unanticipated and seemingly inevitable.

Visit an alternate America where European colonization never took place in this intricately plotted police procedural from Francis Spufford.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Poor Deer

Review by Thane Tierney

Who gets to forgive, who gets to forget and who decides when someone has paid their debt? These questions, like life itself, are messy and open to speculation, particularly in Claire Oshetsky’s latest novel, Poor Deer. Her charmingly weird 2021 debut, Chouette, won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. If there is such a thing as a sophomore slump, Oshetsky has deftly sidestepped it, producing a tale that both enchants and perplexes.

Margaret Murphy, a 4-year-old child in a Northeastern mill town, is inadvertently responsible for the death of her best friend, Agnes, when an invented game, “Awake, Oh Princess,” goes terribly wrong. Margaret is dimly aware of her misdeed but is too young to recognize its complete horror.

Much like the Under Toad in John Irving’s 1978 classic The World According to Garp, a misheard adult phrase morphs into an ominous presence in the active mind of the young child. This time it’s the Poor Deer, a cloven-hoofed apparition with yellow nubs for teeth who visits Margaret as accuser, judge and jury.

At the book’s outset, Margaret (now a 16-year-old) and Poor Deer are locked in a battle of wills. She has promised to finally tell herself, and the reader, the truth, and the story alternates between the present day and the fateful events surrounding Agnes’ death. Yet despite her intentions, Margaret emerges as a classic unreliable narrator. Time and again, the fog of memory occludes any attempt at a journalistic account of past events, and readers are left with the task of winnowing the wheat from the chaff.

Oshetsky deftly pulls aside the curtain to show us Margaret’s struggle to reconcile her emotional, subjective history with the persistent, objective one that keeps intruding on her psyche. Ultimately, even if the details are somewhat suspect, emotional honesty may earn Margaret the right to the forgiveness she so desperately craves, and convince Poor Deer to trot back into the subconscious forest from which she sprang.

Claire Oshetsky deftly sidesteps the sophomore slump with Poor Deer, an enchanting, perplexing tale of a young girl haunted by a cloven-hoofed apparition.
FictionComing of Age

Happy

Review by Thane Tierney

Happy Singh Soni is not, well, happy: He is longing for more. And, given his condition at the outset of Celina Baljeet Basra’s debut novel, why wouldn’t he be? His home, a Punjabi farming village that is being steadily encroached upon by an expanding theme park, is no place for a young man with ambition—of which, make no mistake, Happy has a bountiful platter.

Happy’s primary objective is to travel to Europe and become something befitting his expansive and flighty imagination: perhaps a movie star or a playwright. Constantly updating his résumé, he envisions his future with “a lustrous, luxurious bathroom made entirely of Makrana marble.” This makes him an easy mark for those only too eager to shepherd the dreamer to the Europe of his imagination . . . for a price.

In a very timely manner, Basra makes a potent point about how undocumented workers are frequently abused both economically and physically. After a harrowing journey, Happy finds himself in Italy, working at a radish farm as an undocumented immigrant. His proximity to the Italian film studio Cinecitta makes his goal of stardom feel tantalizingly close, yet it remains every bit as remote as it was in India. He puts on a brave face even while the gap between his dreams and his daily life becomes a virtually unbridgeable chasm.

Although Happy starts out at a leisurely pace, this is just a matter of Basra taking the time to build Happy’s complex character layer upon layer, encouraging the reader to root for her quixotic protagonist. As his life, somewhat predictably, falls short of his lofty ambitions, she manages to keep Happy true to his ideals, rather than having him succumb to cynicism or bitterness.

The book’s unexpected climax is handled so masterfully that it seems, in retrospect, inevitable. The humanity underpinning Happy’s story will speak to anyone with a heart and a dream.

Happy’s unexpected climax is handled so masterfully that it seems, in retrospect, inevitable. The humanity underpinning this story will speak to anyone with a heart and a dream.

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