"The windiest militant trash/Important Persons shout." Thus wrote Auden on the eve of WWII, but we hear the same bluster on today's campaign trail. Harry Parker's Anatomy of a Soldier is a somber reminder of what war does to actual soldiers.

The novel recalls Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. It considers soldiers from the perspective of the objects associated with them. These objects do, in fact, narrate the novel. This is a bold, possibly gimmicky approach. It is effective for some objects—a drone, for instance, or a Kalashnikov. It is less effective for others, like boots. Indeed the narration sometimes approaches the homoerotic. "He moved his hand up my shaft," to choose one example, about a rifle. A catheter's thoughts about BA5799 are best left unsaid.

BA5799 has a name: Tom Barnes. But the author may suggest that we treat soldiers like objects. When killed, we dispose of them. When damaged, we repair them with prosthetics. This happens to Barnes. We know this because his prothesis says so. And bystanders sometimes think he resembles a robot. But soldiers are not robots. Barnes feels remorse and sorrow. He loves a woman and he sometimes loves war.

Like Parker, Barnes serves with the British Army in a country like Afghanistan. Barnes offers $2,000 to a father whose son the British Army kills. Parker is commendable for trying to include such stories. But occupier and occupied resent the occupation. They believe it has only worsened things. Even so, Barnes holds no grudge against his attackers. Convalescing back home, he insists he would buy them a drink.

Parker seems to be aiming for Hemingway. At its best, the novel recalls the first devastating chapter of A Farewell to Arms. But elsewhere Parker is less terse and more sentimental. He is more late, boozy Hemingway than otherwise. When Parker writes that in war "no one wins" he is trafficking in a cliche that lends no solution to war's problems. 

Hemingway broke ground writing about the price that modern war exacts. Parker, too, provides an antidote to the latest windiest militant trash Important Persons shout. 

When asked about their ethnicity, people in Appalachia are the most likely to reply that they are Americans. So perhaps it is fitting that American noir writing seems to have relocated to Appalachia. Think of Cormac McCarthy's Suttree and the derivative writings of Chris Offutt. But little feels derivative about Lee Clay Johnson's debut, Nitro Mountain. It is an excellent specimen, appalling in its subject matter but deft in execution.

The novel begins with Leon, a nullity facing a DUI charge. He floats between gigs as a bass player and a job at "Foodville.” One day a villain named Arnett intoxicates him on Robot, a mix of meth and heroin. Leon and Arnett share a love interest, a sassy and ferocious woman named Jennifer, who convinces Leon to poison Arnett. This initiates a train of violence so breathtaking it's a wonder the town and its people survive. Fueling the violence is what Arnett calls splo, aka moonshine.

Appalachia was always hardscrabble and forsaken. But even amidst the coal era it had social cohesion and national worth. In Johnson's version, a woman's best career is turning tricks or soft porn. For men there's military service, or hauling trash or selling blood. Or music. "Now that the coal's gone," says one character, "music's our only damn export." There's no Main Street. There are only boarded-up buildings dwarfed by superstores and fast food joints.

Nitro Mountain comes recommended by David Gates, whose novel Jernigan also studied American life on the skids. Both novels are intelligent and sympathetic portraits of hard-up people making bad, justifiable decisions. Much of Nitro Mountain occurs in bars soundtracked by electronic lottery and Hank Williams. "Nothing's as sad," writes Johnson, "as the sound of happy hour ending."

Johnson's savage prose more than compensates for the maudlin milieu. Today a need for haste infects most writers. Johnson forces you to slow down. The language is bold, arresting and well-timed. The main characters are also drawn with depth and sincerity. This is especially true of Jennifer. Her faint hopes for a better life are overcome by the necessity of surviving in this one. The novel's finale is sordid and irreversible, recalling perhaps The Beans of Egypt, Maine.

But this is a novel about Americans, which is to say about freedom. Its characters are hard-pressed and lamentable. But they think themselves free, and to that extent, they are.

Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler’s debut novel, is the literary equivalent of spiked chocolate mousse: the lightest of confections, but with a powerful kick. Danler, a former waitress, has fashioned a breezy piece of fiction that dramatizes the behind-the-scenes activities of a posh Manhattan restaurant in exact and unsparing detail. This episodic novel’s depiction of staff members who bandy profanities and snort the harshest drugs is so precise and vividly rendered that, the next time you patronize a fancy eatery, you may wonder what those smiling greeters are up to behind the swinging door.

In June 2006, a 22-year-old English major named Tess arrives in New York from her Midwestern hometown and gets a job as a back waiter at Union Square’s most popular restaurant. Tess is such a novice about food that, when she’s asked during her interview to name “the five noble grapes of Bordeaux,” she “pictured cartoon grapes wearing crowns on their heads, welcoming me to their châteaux.”

The owner hires Tess, however, because he sees her as a “fifty-one percenter,” a person who has the empathy and work ethic lacking in many restaurant employees. Soon, Tess is part of a crew that includes a chef who demands that no one speak to him while he cooks, a food runner who writes screenplays and the bartender with whom Tess is smitten.

Occasionally, Danler tries too hard to be literary, but for the most part, Sweetbitter is a feast of coarse dialogue and industry insight. “You will stumble on secrets,” Tess says early in the novel. So will readers of this entertaining debut.

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

There are pet people, and there are people who don’t understand pet people. If you’re the latter, Lily and the Octopus may not be the book for you.

Debut novelist Steven Rowley is a pet person, as evidenced by every page of this book. It’s clear from the outset that author and character alike are taken with Lily, the dachshund at the center of this emotional, big-hearted novel. Take, for example, the first words of narrator Ted Flask: “Thursday nights are the nights my dog, Lily, and I set aside to talk about boys we think are cute. . . . . We get into long debates over the Ryans. I’m a Gosling man, whereas she’s a Reynolds gal, even though she can’t name a single movie of his that she would ever watch twice.” But 12-year-old Lily has an unwanted companion—a tumor Ted dubs “the octopus.” Ted will stop at nothing to keep his pet safe, but it may not be enough.

Whether it’s Lily! Exclaiming! Her! Emotions! or Ted quietly wondering how to prolong his best friend’s life, Rowley’s characters are rich and relatable. In fact, they’re so fully realized that this book’s appeal may not be limited to pet people after all: Lily and the Octopus will move anyone who has ever loved an animal, but it can also help those who don’t understand the rest of us.

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The “women with secrets” trend in publishing (Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train) shows no signs of easing with the release of I Let You Go, a gripping debut thriller set in England. A brief prologue sets the stage: A mother and son are headed home after school on a rainy afternoon. Suddenly, a “car comes from nowhere.” The child is hit and killed, and the car takes off. 

This terrible tragedy is investigated by middle-aged police detective Ray and his idealistic, rookie partner, Kate. Ray’s marriage is not what it used to be, especially since his teenage son, Tom, has grown sullen and distant. 

Then there’s Jenna Gray. Haunted by the accident and lamenting the loss of a son she loved “with an intensity that seemed impossible,” she runs away to an isolated coastal town. Her story alternates with Ray and Kate’s as they investigate and begin blurring the lines between the personal and the professional. Author Clare Mackintosh also introduces one more dastardly character who will bring everyone together—that is, if he doesn’t kill someone first.

A former law enforcement officer, Mackintosh was inspired to write I Let You Go by a similar real-life case, as well as the loss of her own son, and her experience lends her characters’ actions and feelings a visceral realism. Jenna’s grief is genuine and well-wrought, while the peril she eventually faces is convincing. Ray and Kate, meanwhile, are an engaging, authentic duo. I Let You Go is undeniably a page-turner.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

How well can you know a person, even a person you’ve loved and lived with for decades? This is the question posed by Phaedra Patrick’s gentle, funny and wistful first novel, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper.

The curious charms mentioned in the title are not attributes of Arthur Pepper, a rather ordinary pensioner from Yorkshire. They are actual charms found on a bracelet that belonged to his late wife, Miriam. Arthur’s investigations show them to be mementos of specific times, people and places in her life. It seems that the outwardly contented wife and mother that Arthur knew was a very different person before they met and married.

As Arthur uncovers Miriam’s past, the charms of Arthur himself become more evident. Amazingly old-fashioned, he seems not to have come of age in the 1960s but the 1950s or earlier; this made the reviewer think, "Come on, this chap is younger than Mick Jagger." But this is part of the book’s sweetness. 

A virgin when he married, Arthur has never been with another woman; even chastely kissing an old friend of Miriam’s makes him feel vaguely adulterous. He dutifully waters his fern, whom he has named Frederica. He treats even the weirdest people he meets on his quest with kindness and frets that his stodginess squashed something adventurous in his wife. Arthur’s charms, in this charmless age, are curious indeed.

Charming, too, is Patrick’s straightforward and unadorned style. Because of this, when Arthur’s grief overwhelms him like the tiger who almost eats him at one point—you have to read the book—it pierces the heart. You root for him every step of the way.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

First, we had The Devil Wears Prada, written by a former assistant at Vogue. Now comes The Assistants, a novel by Camille Perri, a former assistant to Esquire’s editor-in-chief, which similarly shines a light on the underpaid gatekeepers to the one percent. The difference in this book is that our heroine gets ahead by illicit means. This isn’t exactly the stuff fluffy romances are made of—it owes more to Robin Hood, or maybe Bonnie and Clyde, if Bonnie left Clyde in the car and distributed her spoils among her friends.

In The Assistants, 30-year-old Tina Fontana works for fictional titan Robert Barlow. Robert is capitalism personified: He’s cutthroat in the boardroom, but generous at home. He drops businessmen who cross him, but loves his wife. He manipulates the media, but oozes Southern charm in real life. Tina dedicates herself to him, masters his schedule and earns his trust.

But Tina also owes thousands in student loans, and she realizes that no matter how hard she works, earning $50K a year in Manhattan will never let her get out from under it. Her friends, almost exclusively assistants, are in the same boat. They attended expensive colleges only to land in a job market that has them running errands and cutting cocktail limes for the rich and famous. As they watch their bosses spend massive amounts on expensive meals, jewelry and liquor, it’s no wonder they’re tempted to reach for the money that literally passes through their fingers.

Perri, who has also worked as a books editor for Cosmopolitan, has an assured voice and grounds her story and characters well. The Assistants is an economic fable, a story of class warfare dressed up as chick lit. We have the familiar heroine, the love interest, a quirky band of 20-something girlfriends and a New York City setting complete with cheap apartments and expensive cocktails. But the real story is Tina’s search for justice and compensation for her hard work—a timely theme in a world where so many expensive college educations yield underpaid menial jobs and years of unpaid internships. Powerful people of the world, take notice: The assistants will have their revenge.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

No one can accuse Martin Seay of lacking ambition. His first novel, The Mirror Thief, is a 600-page thrill ride across three centuries and two continents. But this is hardly a punishment for readers. It’s a workout, but of the intellectual kind: part crime thriller and part meditation on poetry, with unexpected plot twists and references to famous figures as diverse as the French dramatist Antonin Artaud and Jay Leno.

The action moves back and forth among three different parts of the world and three distinct eras. In 2003, on the eve of the second Gulf War, Curtis Stone, a 40-year-old African-American ex-Marine, arrives in Las Vegas from his Philadelphia home. A club owner named Damon has hired Curtis to search for gambler Stanley Glass, ostensibly to collect on a marker. Curtis has trouble locating the elusive Stanley, but he finds one of Stanley’s treasured possessions: a slender volume of poems, “The Mirror Thief,” written in 1958 by a proto-beatnik named Adrian Welles.

Cut to 1958, when Stanley, a 16-year-old card sharp fresh off the train from Staten Island, shows up in Malibu, California, in hope of meeting Welles. Stanley, who adores Welles’ poems, wants to talk about “The Mirror Thief” and its mysterious subject: a 16th-century alchemist named Crivano. The novel’s wildly ambitious third segment takes us to Venice in 1592, where a sultan has sent the murderous Crivano to “locate craftsmen adept at fashioning the flawless mirrors for which every civilized land celebrates the isle of Murano, and return with those craftsmen to the Ottoman court.”

The Mirror Thief is overstuffed with incident and period detail, but it’s still an impressive feat of imagination. Much of this book, Seay seems to be saying, is like one’s reflection in a mirror: What you see in front of you isn’t the whole story.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.