All Sally Horner wanted was to fit in with the cool girls at school. What she got instead was two years of harrowing captivity at the hands of a sexual predator.

Author T. Greenwood recounts Sally’s real-life plight in Rust & Stardust, a shocking crime novel about the famous real-life 1948 abduction that inspired Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and the film that followed.

Eleven-year-old Sally’s effort to make friends goes awry when the other girls tell her she must steal something from a local pharmacy. When she does, she’s immediately caught by Frank LaSalle, a man who purports to be an FBI agent and threatens to arrest her if she doesn’t do as he says. Sally believes LaSalle intends to take her before a judge, and LaSalle in turn poses as the father of one of the other girls and convinces Sally’s mother to allow her to accompany his family to Atlantic City for a weeklong vacation. So begins nearly two years of lies and torment as LaSalle absconds with Sally, traveling from state to state in an effort to elude the law.

As the novel is told in large part through Sally’s youthful perspective, it is easy to see how she is so easily duped by an adult who professes to be first an officer of the law and later her long-lost father. Readers will sympathize with Sally’s tragic plight while being revolted by LaSalle’s predatory instinct as he sexually exploits her.

Greenwood reportedly spent more than two years researching Sally’s abduction and years drafting Rust & Stardust. The result is an unflinching portrait of a vile criminal and his helpless victim. What is perhaps just as vivid is how sexual predators today continue to mirror the exact methods LaSalle used to usurp Sally’s will—and body—with empty promises, gifts and eventually threats.

This article was originally published in the August 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.

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.

With its generational clash of cultures, the 1960s have always been fertile ground for fiction. Like The Graduate, The Only Story by British novelist and Man Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes concerns a young man’s affair with an older woman who is suffocating in a loveless, sexless marriage.

Nineteen-year-old Paul, on a summer break from university, is encouraged to join the club by his mother, who is hopeful he’ll make social connections. Susan Macleod is married with two daughters at university, and is keeping up appearances by playing at the stuffy local tennis club. She encourages a reckless affair that consumes and taints much of Paul’s life. As an older man reflecting on it, Paul says it left him “walking wounded.”

It’s Susan, not Paul, who dominates the page. At first it seems absurd that her pent-up civil servant husband, Gordon, can tolerate her relationship with a teenager, referring to him as “your fancy boy.” Gordon even allows Paul to eat dinner with them. Gordon typifies that era’s English middle class and its inability to express emotion. Instead, an inner rage seethes inside him. We gather the extent of this when Paul meets Susan outside a London doctor’s office and discovers she’s nursing a broken jaw.

Susan’s mental and physical decline and its effect on Paul—who is almost Samaritan-like in his inability to leave—are torturous. Susan’s quiet, suburban devastation turns into a full-blown catastrophe as Paul takes on the role of caretaker, being mistaken at one point as his former lover’s grandson.

The skill in Barnes’ writing is a complete lack of sentimentality, his unflinching depiction the equivalent of slowing down to observe a car crash. You can’t help but stare.

Not long ago, it would have been fantasy that Ireland would have a gay prime minister, but the majority-Catholic country welcomed its first in 2017. The country has evolved from an often hateful hierocracy to a seat of social liberalism. Of this evolution, John Boyne’s new novel is an essential witness.

In 1945, the priesthood tears the novel’s narrator, Cyril, as an infant from his mother. A banker and his literary wife, Maude Avery, adopt him. Cyril discovers that he has no interest in girls, instead nursing a crush on his best mate, Julian. Homosexuality in Ireland being both sinful and criminal, Cyril must stay mum. But he confesses his many backroom trysts to a priest, who croaks as a result.

Like many gay men, Cyril marries out of convention, but not before professing his love to Julian. This goes over like a lead balloon, so Cyril finds himself in Amsterdam in Conradian exile. Dutch mores are more amenable; Cyril meets the love of his life. But even Holland has its hostilities. So the pair ends up in New York City at the height of the AIDS crisis. There Cyril becomes a volunteer in an AIDS clinic, and he and his partner adopt a son after a fashion. Normalcy is within reach before a homophobe assaults the pair in Central Park.

These are Furies on the visible spectrum. They pursue Cyril back to Ireland, where signs of a thaw are already evident. (Cyril is even propositioned by a bisexual pol aspiring to become prime minister.) Cyril reconciles with the ghosts of his past, including his estranged wife and biological mother.

More than a coming-of-age story, The Heart’s Invisible Furies is one man’s journey from persecution to toleration. Punctuated with simple dialogue, its nearly 600 pages betray Maude’s dictum that “brevity is the key.” But the novel seldom lags and often delights.

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

Julia Robinson and Cassie Burnes are best friends, enjoying a carefree life on the cusp of adolescence in Royston, a sleepy town in the North Shore of Massachusetts. The unsettling changes that upend their placid existence are the subject of The Burning Girl, veteran novelist Claire Messud’s penetrating psychological thriller about “what it means to be a girl growing up.”

Julia and Cassie spend the summer before seventh grade exploring the environs of Royston, in excursions that take them to a posh country estate turned long-abandoned women’s mental asylum, among other places. But that idyllic summer—one that’s marred only by a dog bite Cassie sustains at the animal shelter where the girls volunteer—marks a turning point in a relationship in which they’ve been “conjoined all their lives,” as Julia, the novel’s narrator, describes it.

As middle school begins, Cassie falls in with a group of girls led by one whom Julia bitterly nicknames the Evil Morsel. Cassie’s life takes an even darker turn after Anders Shute, the emergency room doctor who cared for her dog bite, begins a relationship with her widowed mother. Are the disturbing changes in Cassie’s behavior—ones that lead her to question what she’s been told about her father’s death in a car accident when she was 11 months old—merely the result of Shute’s strict discipline or something more sinister?

The author of five previous novels, including The Emperor’s Children and The Woman Upstairs, Messud masterfully portrays Julia’s mounting dismay at her friend’s choices and the events they set in motion, as the girls are carried far from a time “when we could never have imagined coming unstuck.” For all the suspense Messud sustains after a desperate Cassie recklessly digs too deeply for the truth about her father’s death, the poignant depiction of the girls’ estrangement—fueled by their inevitable path toward adulthood—is an equally compelling reason to read this haunting novel.

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