Reviews and synopses won’t prepare you for the experience of reading this book. That’s what it is—an experience of the exploration of grief and readjustment after loss. Delicate but not frail, analytical yet not over-thought, Zinzi Clemmons’ debut novel is a great success. It’s a multidimensional study of life pre-and post-bereavement executed in an incredibly creative manner.

Thandi is an African-American woman raised in Philadelphia, born to a South African mother and an American father. Her identity is split between the two countries, and she explores the significance of race and wealth presented by each through intelligent and strategic storytelling. She reveals her personality through nonlinear vignettes, which are often only a half-page or even a sentence long, but her prose is so powerful that the story lacks nothing. Thandi’s mother is diagnosed with cancer and ultimately succumbs to the disease, which sends Thandi and her father spiraling on separate tangents of grief. Thandi struggles to understand her emotions in a way that is sometimes starkly logical as she draws charts and graphs to explain them. Some days she doesn’t try to understand; she just retreats to public places to avoid her thoughts. In an intermingling storyline that takes place following her mother’s death, she becomes a mother herself, which challenges her every pre-existing belief about motherhood. She attempts to accept other forms of loss such as identity, connection to the past and romantic relationships.

What We Lose contains photographs of various supporting, nonfictional world events that inform Thandi’s character and the roundabout way she expands her story. This novel is not only a journey with Thandi in life after loss, but a true exploration of the complexities of identity and womanhood.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Zinzi Clemmons takes us Behind the Book. 

In the shadow of Wounded Knee, the characters in Alexandra Fuller’s debut novel strive to make, force or find their way. Life on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation reads as both humorous and heartbreaking in Quiet Until the Thaw. Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson are cousins, bound by shared ancestry and blood, but little else. Rick grows to appreciate and revere the ways of the land of his people, the Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation; You Choose turns his back on the Rez and all it would teach him.

Fuller says much in few, well-chosen words, like the quiet Rick Overlooking Horse himself, who left the Rez to serve in Vietnam and came back burned in body but resolute in spirit. Winding through seminal events from the 1940s to the 2000s, Fuller muses on the nature of time itself, how it circles and returns, how cycles repeat themselves. You Choose wanders north, returns, becomes tribal chairman and then loses it all in a fit of rage. Rick finds his home in a meadow, tends wild horses, befriends buffalo and, late one night, becomes the caretaker for twin baby boys. A couple, Le-a Brings Plenty and Squanto, help raise them.

A nonfiction writer and memoirist, Fuller writes unhurriedly and with an economy of expression that is nonetheless evocative. Her characters’ lives and motivations—from You Choose and Rick to their guardian Mina; from Le-a and Squanto to the twin boys Jerusalem and Daniel—aren’t fully realized, but what is explored paints a vivid picture. As they search for belonging and meaning, every piece of the slowly unveiled story helps fill in the complicated puzzle of their relationships. You Choose’s and Rick’s paths meet time and time again until one last encounter, when the path of one becomes the path of the other in their seemingly fated intersection. Fuller writes: “Since all things are connected, always and for all time, there is no avoiding reunion.”

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

Cassie Hugo, one of two women at the center of The Confusion of Languages, the touching debut novel by Siobhan Fallon (You Know When the Men Are Gone), has many reasons to be jealous of Margaret Brickshaw, the biggest of which is Margaret’s family. It’s May 2011, the time of the Arab Spring. Both women are married to soldiers who work for the U.S. embassy in Jordan. But while Cassie and Dan haven’t conceived a child in their nine-year marriage (including the two years they’ve lived in Amman), Margaret and Crick, new to Jordan, have a 15-month-old boy named Mather.

Cassie’s jealousy might have been less intense if Dan hadn’t signed them up to sponsor the new arrivals. But she does her best to befriend Margaret and hide her sadness whenever she holds Mather and thinks, “This is everything I want.”

On the morning of May 13, with the men on assignment in Italy, Margaret gets into a car accident and doesn’t return from embassy headquarters, where she was supposed to fill out paperwork. While Cassie babysits Mather, she reads Margaret’s journals, in which Margaret chronicled relationships with people she met in Jordan, including two guards, one of whom teaches her Arabic and, in a moving scene, invites her to dinner with his family.

Cassie suspects Margaret may be seeing one of these men and that the affair may explain her disappearance, a suspicion fueled by an enigmatic journal entry: “I must find him. I must make it right.”

The device of one character reading another’s journal is a cliché, but The Confusion of Languages is nonetheless a moving work about desire and the dislocation one might experience in a foreign land. As Fallon shrewdly makes clear, a friend can be as mysterious as the ways of another culture.

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