Inspired by true events, Sharon Bala’s multifaceted debut novel is not only about a group of 500 Sri Lankan refugees, the titular “boat people,” but also about the people they left behind and those who will decide their fates upon arriving in 2009 Vancouver.

Bala builds her narrative around one of the refugees, Mahindan, and his 6-year-old son, Sellian. Mahindan’s case (as well as four other refugees’) is represented by Priya, a second-generation Sri Lankan-Canadian law student who has been grudgingly assigned to refugee law her last semester. While Grace, a third-generation Japanese-Canadian, adjudicates each case, her mother, Kumi, uncovers secrets from her childhood partly spent in an internment camp. However truthfully he tells it, reception of Mahindan’s story is vulnerable to political pressures and other characters’ moods. Will Priya convince Grace to grant him asylum, or will he be deported?

Cinematic details—such as sights and sounds at the market in Mahindan’s hometown and characters’ gestures as they talk—transport us to a tension-rich drama. Bala moves fluidly from past to present, mixing memories with current crises. In one scene, while Christmas lights and snowfall glisten outside, Priya’s uncle confesses to her the story of his own flight from Sri Lanka. In another, Kumi’s internment story is set alongside a discussion between Grace and the Prime Minister, who believes the threat of terrorism is high among the refugees. Such juxtapositions build and maintain suspense all the way to the last line, where readers are left hanging, as if justice is in our hands. How do we react to the immigration crisis? What would we do in any of these characters’ shoes?

The Boat People reminds us of the fragile nature of truth.

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Andrew Cohen is part of the New York City cultural elite—a New York University professor and prominent thinker who has designed his whole life around optimum comfort and aesthetics. His urban apartment is sleek—albeit unwelcoming to his two daughters—and he enjoys a relationship with a former student nearly half his age.

Andrew’s well-curated life is flipped on end when he starts having disturbing visions that leave him shaken and physically ill. They appear to be connected to an ancient ritual taking place in a Jewish temple. A secular Jew, Andrew doesn’t know what to make of the scenes flashing through his mind.

The Ruined House, which won Israel’s biggest literary award (the Sapir Prize), is a fascinatingly claustrophobic year inside Andrew’s mind. He is not a particularly likable man, focused as he is solely on his reputation and physical appearance. Yet, as he descends into the hellish clutches of increasingly frequent visions, one can’t help feeling for him.

The story is in part a meditation on the isolation of the modern age, when one can live among millions of people in a vibrant city, yet still be utterly alone. It’s also, not coincidentally, set in the year before September 11, 2001, and a sense of doom hovers over every lyrical page: “The sky blue of the river meets the water blue of the sky, divided only by the thin filament of the George Washington Bridge, stretching from bank to bank like the hint of a knowing smile: The day would come when all would return to what it had been and the world would revert to chaos.”

But at its core, The Ruined House is an examination of one man’s midlife crisis, and how we all are the sum of our inescapable, barely beneath-the-surface history.

Bill McKibben is well-known for his environmental activism, especially his passionate advocacy on the issue of climate change. With 16 books to his credit (including his 1989 work, The End of Nature, often considered to be the first book on climate change for a general audience), he has never before tried his hand at fiction. McKibben’s good-natured debut novel, Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance, is the story of a quartet of Vermonters who resort to unconventional tactics to persuade their fellow citizens to entertain the seemingly preposterous idea of seceding from the United States.

The conspirators’ ringleader is Vern Barclay, a septuagenarian former talk show host. He holes up with Perry Alterson—a 19-year-old with mild Asperger’s syndrome and a passion for Motown music—in the home of Vern’s friend, Sylvia Granger, who runs a “School for New Vermonters” that teaches skills like driving in the mud. They’re joined by Trance Harper, a former Olympic biathlete. With Perry as his engineer, Vern launches a series of podcasts inspired by his concern that “our communities were starting to fail,” and urges the inhabitants of the Green Mountain State to consider following in the footsteps of the movement’s stubbornly independent patron saint: Revolutionary War soldier and politician Ethan Allen.

The actions of Vern and his cohorts, including a few pranks that are more irritating than dangerous, provoke a gross overreaction by the authorities, played out in some scenes of mostly slapstick violence. McKibben wisely leaves unresolved the ultimate question of whether Vermonters will vote at their annual town meetings to support turning their state into a fledgling republic, while effectively portraying even Vern’s mounting ambivalence as his movement rapidly gathers momentum.

Radio Free Vermont is less a brief for secession than it is a gentle argument for the virtues of responsible civic engagement. In a time when many Americans feel alienated from the machinery of government, that’s a message worth taking seriously.

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

Mark and Karen Breakstone could be any other mid-40s couple. They met through a setup by mutual friends, fell in love easily and quickly, and are slowly checking the boxes toward domestic bliss: marriage, financial security and then, finally, a baby. But this is a story from “Mad Men” creator and writer Matthew Weiner, and fans of his iconic TV show know it can’t be that simple. Spoiler alert: It isn’t.

Mark’s career takes off in ways they couldn’t have imagined, and the Breakstones find themselves quite wealthy, establishing a posh lifestyle on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. After leaving her career to care for the baby, Karen finds herself resenting her husband, his success and little things about their marriage. Thankfully, Heather is an angelic, easy baby, and she grows into a caring, intuitive and beautiful young woman. She is both the glue that keeps her family together and the thing that might tear them apart, each parent vying for her attention and affection, even at the peril of their own relationship. And when Heather catches the eye of Bobby Klasky, a construction worker renovating their apartment building, things take a dark turn.

Bobby is a career criminal with a tragic past and a misanthropic present. Weiner tells Bobby’s story in parallel to the Breakstones’, switching back and forth between both narratives at an almost breathless pace. The novel seems to be building toward an inevitable, brutal end, and it is—just not in the way you might think.

Heather, the Totality is a sharp, slim page-turner, though much simmers underneath the surface of Weiner’s deft prose. In his portrait of an American family in crisis, Weiner makes us question ourselves, our motivations and just how far we would go for the people we love.

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

The Holocaust is one of the darkest chapters in human history, and yet the stories that are born of it seem to be the most extraordinary examples of love and life. Emanuel Bergmann’s first novel, The Trick, which begins soon after the end of World War I, is no exception.

For Rabbi Laibl Goldenhirsch and his wife, Rifka, there is another reason to celebrate the return of peace to Prague—the birth of their son, Moshe. The new child briefly provides a respite from an otherwise unexciting postwar life. However, things take a turn as Rifka’s health deteriorates, leaving Moshe to deal with an abusive, depressed and drunk rabbi of a father.

Everything changes for Moshe when a neighbor takes him to a traveling circus as a cheerful distraction. So transformed is Moshe by what he sees that he wants nothing more than to become part of the troupe. With the determination of a child who is not yet unnerved by the possibility of failure, Moshe sets out in search of the circus, leaving his father, his city and his religion and changing his destiny from that of the many who stay behind.

Decades later in Los Angeles, a young boy named Max Cohn takes a similar leap of faith to keep his parents from divorcing. His answer comes in the form of an old vinyl record of love spells by the Great Zabbatini, a magician who can make anything possible.

And just like that, Bergmann expertly collides Moshe’s and Max’s universes. They may face two very different realities, but they share the tenacity to change their futures. The tragedy of the past weaves together with humor, love and a belief in the impossible in The Trick.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book essay from Emanuel Bergmann on The Trick.

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

Most of us don’t think about bees that much. Few of us know that there are over 20,000 species, and that fewer than 10 of these species produce honey. Or that one out of every three bites of food that we consume relies on them for pollination, and that without our apian friends, blueberries and cherries would more or less cease to exist.

So it might come as a bit of a surprise that Norwegian author and screenwriter Maja Lunde would choose the humble insect as an organizing principle for The History of Bees, her first novel for adults. But here’s the head fake: This book is about bees the same way Moby-Dick is a book about whales or The Moviegoer is about movies.

In some ways, her novel is reminiscent of the 1998 art film The Red Violin, in that it weaves together three fairly disparate stories spread across the better part of two and a half centuries, their only common touch point being the hives that brought honey, economic uncertainty and the possibility of ecological redemption.

Chapters shuttle back and forth between a 19th-century British biologist, a millennial-era American beekeeper and a Chinese hand-pollinator on the cusp of a dystopian 22nd century. At the outset, the connections between the three are opaque, but Lunde’s compelling narrative draws the reader in—more like a spider than a bee, actually. Much as in Ray Bradbury’s famed story “A Sound of Thunder,” the “butterfly effect” is in full effect, as decisions made long ago and far away influence outcomes in unpredictable but realistic ways.

And while it might be putting too fine a point on it, Lunde demonstrates how our social order mirrors that of the bees: Some of us are workers, some drones and a lucky few queens, but each contributes to the upkeep of the hive in ways we may never understand.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, CA, and spent several hundred dollars earlier this year to have a hive humanely removed from his home.