The occupation of Iraq was as nebulous as the reasons for the original invasion. Indeed, the war's raisons d'être multiplied as the years progressed. In Matt Gallagher's important debut novel, Youngblood, a lieutenant stationed in Iraq asks the trillion-dollar question: "Just what . . . were we doing?"

The ephemerality and pointlessness of this postmodern war pervade the novel's skeletal plot. Lieutenant Jack Porter goes on missions, people are killed, mosques are destroyed, blood money is offered. Soldiers stage fights between spiders and scorpions for amusement; they read misleading press releases to incredulous reporters. Vehicles are dismantled to avoid falling into enemy hands. Ultimately, Porter's only worthwhile endeavor is arranging an Iraqi family's escape from the country. He does this despite his more bellicose superiors, who refer to Iraq as "Indian country.”

Gallagher is best when conveying the predictable hostility of Iraq's people and geography. Like many Americans, Porter protested the invasion, or "collapse," as Iraqis called it. But, like his compatriots, he becomes determined to see the war through. Between attachments to the Iraqis and his fellow soldiers, and the rush of combat, he finds purposefulness amidst the waste and pain. He's no innocent, however. He boasts 48 kills, wants a "real war" and snaps dubiously that America "wins wars.” Striking imperial poses, he derides the Iraqis' lack of punctuality.

Gallagher is a former U.S. Army captain who blogged about his own deployment in Iraq. The novel sometimes resembles a mishmash of blog and screenplay; it's mostly dialogue, some action, less Weltschmerz. It has the light footprint American planners always hoped for in Iraq, but provides no easy answers. It's chaotic and sometimes nonsensical. But as Gallagher writes, "the truest war stories made the least sense."

Wendell and Frank, the elderly lovers of Matthew Griffin’s debut novel, are an annoying pair of hairpins. When the reader meets them, they are crotchety old guys living in some moribund little town in North Carolina. Soon, you learn the two of them were sort of curmudgeonly even when they were young.

Wendell, the narrator of the tale, would also probably object to him and Frank being called “lovers.” Though the action takes place in the waning years of the 20th century, Wendell pretends to be Frank’s brother when he’s taken to the hospital for a stroke. He also disapproves of the way younger gay men flaunt themselves; the sight of Nate Berkus on the cover of Architectural Digest with his husband and baby would have given him the vapors. The book isn’t called Hide for nothing; Frank and Wendell are comfortable in their closet. He and Frank have chosen to live in a place just far enough from town so they can do their shopping but discourage busybodies. 

Still, after a while the two begin to grow on you. Wendell, rejected by his family, is a misanthrope. A taxidermist, his relationship with Frank begins while Wendell prepares a deer—surely one of the squickiest getting-to-know-you scenes in modern literature. Frank, who comes from a loving family, ultimately rejects them to be with Wendell. They are each other’s entire world. Why else would Wendell spend hours baking complicated cakes or buying up every last fruitcake in town because they’re the only food that appeals to Frank after his stroke? The reader understands, with an anticipatory grief, that the stroke has not only taken Frank’s appetite but has left him weak and confused. Wendell will simply not be able to take care of him for long.

Frank and Wendell’s tragedy is that they’ve been forced, by law and then by habit, to forswear those networks that would have made the vulnerabilities of old age more bearable. There are no friends, no babies, no grandbabies. Even pets don’t fare very well. So, though Griffin fills his story with prickly humor and wit, and a dash or two of gruesomeness, in the end Hide is a book that breaks your heart.

Sharon Guskin’s debut novel is the tender story of a mother’s desperate struggle to heal her troubled child, artfully blended with an intriguing exploration of the world of the paranormal and the provocative question of whether consciousness can survive death.

When conventional therapy fails to alter or explain the disturbing behavior of her 4-year-old son, Noah, single mother Janie Zimmerman turns in despair to the Internet. There she discovers psychiatrist Jerome Anderson, whose unconventional research into the recall of prior lives has cost him respectability in his profession. Soon, their lives are linked in an effort to resolve Noah’s debilitating condition, a quest that takes them deep inside another family’s tragedy.

Though it’s wholly original, the tale of disappearance and death that lies at the core of The Forgetting Time summons the spirit of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Guskin adroitly maintains the pace of her mystery plot while simultaneously revealing the deepening emotional bonds between Janie and Noah and Anderson in a way that contrasts effectively with the novel’s more fantastic elements. She brings that same sensitivity to her portrayal of the grieving mother whose loss draws the trio to the climax of their quest.

Guskin acknowledges her debt to the work of a pair of real-life Jerome Andersons at the Division of Perceptual Studies of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, quoting striking case studies. Regardless of your skepticism or credulity about reincarnation, you’ll come away moved by this affecting tale of maternal love and the unbreakable cords of memory.

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

Is there a better setting for a mystery with a whiff of the supernatural than an English country manor house? From Thornfield Hall to Manderley, literature is replete with spooky old homes: places that pulse with untold dangers, where secrets and horrors from the past whisper from the shadows. 

The eponymous estate in Eve Chase’s debut novel, Black Rabbit Hall, is one such place, though this wasn’t always the case. During the 1960s, it was the Cornish holiday home of the Alton family. Under the watchful eye of their beloved mother, children Amber, Toby, Barney and Kitty would spend lazy summers and school holidays reveling in the pursuits of childhood. But in the present day, the house sits shuttered. To stave off financial ruin, its owner has agreed to rent out the property for weddings, which brings Lorna Smith and her fiance to its gates. Although Black Rabbit Hall is entirely unsuitable for entertaining, Lorna is immediately captivated by the place and can’t shake the feeling that she has visited it before. Curiosity turns into obsession, and Lorna soon finds herself desperate to uncover Black Rabbit Hall’s tragic history.

Chase’s pacing and world-building are excellent, thoroughly setting the scene and bringing her characters to life. There is a dreamy quality to the writing that gives the novel the tenor of a Gothic fairy tale, and although there is a sense of malice and danger that thrums beneath it all, Chase’s achingly beautiful investigation of her characters’ inner lives results in a story that is haunting rather than scary. For fans of Kate Morton and Daphne du Maurier, Black Rabbit Hall is an obvious must-read, but it is sure to please any reader who delights in devilishly thrilling dramas.

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

Legendary writer M.M. “Mimi” Banning hid herself away after feeling suffocated by the fame that accompanied winning a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award at age 20. The only piece of work the reclusive author has managed to produce since then is her son, Frank, a brilliant fourth-grader who uses smart 1930s garb—like pocket squares and wingtips—and facts about the movie business as armor. But after losing her fortune, the tetchy literary talent must write a new book ASAP. 

Enter Alice Whitley, an assistant deployed by Mimi’s editor to travel from New York City to L.A. to make sure Mimi is working. But Mimi doesn’t want Alice’s help, and Alice instead finds herself tasked with being Frank’s companion. Both taken with and frustrated by Frank’s eccentricites, Alice can’t help but be curious about the identity of the boy’s father—and how his handsome, flirty piano teacher fits into the cloistered family’s life. Meanwhile, Alice gently urges the frequently unpleasant Mimi to please, please finish her book.

In her debut, Julia Claiborne Johnson ably conjures a quirky cast and a privileged California world. Be Frank with Me is about being an outsider and the ways in which differences help others see the world in a new way. Like Frank, this offbeat story has a big heart.

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

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, February 2016

Poet and translator Idra Novey brings a considerable imagination to her first work of fiction, Ways to Disappear, in which the disappearance of a famous novelist upends the life of her American translator.

The novel opens with a touch of magic realism: Legendary Brazilian writer Beatriz Yagoda lights a cigar, climbs into an almond tree with a suitcase and vanishes. Hundreds of miles away, her American translator, Emma Neufield, hears the news. Abruptly canceling her classes and leaving her stuffy boyfriend, Miles, behind, Emma flies from snowy Pittsburgh to sultry Rio to lead the search. By the time she arrives, the situation has grown complex: Yagoda’s children, the practical Raquel and the devastatingly sexy Marcus (neither of whom has ever completed reading one of their mother’s books), have discovered that their mother owes thousands to an angry loan shark. The eccentric cast of characters crisscrosses Brazil from Rio’s sordid back alleys to sunny beach towns and island resorts in pursuit of the missing writer. 

Stylish and funny, romantic and surreal, Ways to Disappear is a quirky look at the intimate relationship between author and translator. Novey, who has translated several South American writers, including the great Clarice Lispector, has absorbed their experimental spirit, and the story is interspersed with Miles’ increasingly panicky emails and Emma’s translation notes. Though Ways to Disappear unfolds at the rapid pace of a screwball comedy, there is also something patient and artful about the novel, making it a thoughtful treatise on writing and artmaking that is as profound as it is playful.
 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Novey about Ways to Disappear.

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

There is power in words. A book requires its reader to fill in the blanks, to imagine a world into being. Sometimes, that world is grander than reality.

That’s always appealed to Swedish bookstore clerk Sara Lindqvist. Books are better company than most people, and they’ve taken her to the most amazing places.

The words of Sara’s pen pal, elderly Amy Harris, also appeal to Sara’s imagination. The two struck up a friendship over an exchange of letters and books, and Amy invited Sara to visit her in Broken Wheel, Iowa, to explore the town and fit in plenty of reading. Sara is in. 

Unfortunately, she arrives just after Amy’s funeral. Suddenly, Sara is slapped with a reminder that truth isn’t always as interesting as fiction. 

Sara finds comfort in Amy’s books and becomes determined to draw the townspeople into the world of words. She uses Amy’s collection to launch Oak Tree Bookstore, which becomes a Main Street hub, drawing visitors from beyond Broken Wheel. With every book she sells (or lends), Sara comes closer to finding purpose and a home in a place she didn’t expect to belong.

In The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, Swedish author Katarina Bivald beautifully illustrates the relationship between a reader and her books. Sara once used books as a barrier, but she comes to learn how exchanging stories can connect people—and finds that sometimes, life can surpass even your favorite book.

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

Thirty miles off the coast of California sit the Farallon Islands. To visit them is to feel as though one has cast aside the constraints—and comforts—of civilization. At best, these shores of shale and rock have been ungenerous to humans trying to eke out a living; at worst, they have proven deadly. 

In Abby Geni’s dazzling debut, The Lightkeepers, a young photographer named Miranda joins a small band of biologists who study the birds, sharks and whales that migrate annually to the islands to mate and spawn and, in some cases, die. Though her integration into the group is far from seamless, Miranda finds herself connecting with the bleak and barren beauty of her surroundings. However, when an act of unspeakable violence is perpetrated, it unleashes a cycle of destruction and devastation that not all of them will survive.

With The Lightkeepers, Geni has crafted a novel filled with wide-open spaces and also a creeping claustrophobia. The setting takes on the role of a character, and the Farallons are masterfully brought to life on the page through Geni’s luminous prose. There is a soothing, hypnotic quality to Geni’s writing—and an unexpected tenderness, too, one that belies the thick sense of malice and increasing sense of dread that swirls about Miranda’s island home. Though some of the plot points are predictable, the story is rife with satisfying surprises, in large part because of the successful air of uncertainty that surrounds Miranda’s narration. Riveting from beginning to end, The Lightkeepers is unsettling in all the best ways.

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

In the final year of the Civil War, 15-year-old horse thief Callum meets a girl who changes his life forever. Both he and the girl, Ava, are orphans—Callum is from Ireland and hasn’t seen his family in years, and Ava’s father and brother were casualties of war. After Callum’s band of marauders finds Ava in her crumbling, dilapidated home and threatens her, Callum sets out to rescue her, leaving the group of pillagers behind and stealing their leader’s horse as transport. 

Soon the two find themselves pursued across the savage, war-ridden wilderness by a ruthless slave hunter, with a bounty on their heads. With dreams of making it to Atlanta, if not the Florida coast, Callum and Ava barrel headlong through the bleak, cold landscape with little food and protection, pushing through disappointment after disappointment with the hope that peace lies just around the corner.

Taylor Brown grew up on the Georgia coast and has lived in Buenos Aires, San Francisco and western North Carolina, where much of Fallen Land is set. Filled with metaphor, poetic imagery and rich descriptions, Fallen Land is a beautifully written chronicle of love and hardship, following two people who are meant to be as they fight their way through a world seemingly set against them.

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

A reader need not be a disciple of rock legend Neil Young to find that Only Love Can Break Your Heart strikes a nostalgic chord.

But for those of us who appreciate Young’s immense musical gifts, Ed Tarkington’s debut novel will likely prove twice as harmonious. In many ways a classic coming-of-age story, the novel also digs deep into the loamy depths of the modern Southern Gothic genre, circa 1970s.

Tarkington’s novel unfolds from the perspective of its young narrator, Rocky, whose older brother and hero, Paul, is the quintessential teenage bad boy. When Paul’s bitterness toward the boys’ father leads to a reckless act of defiance that places Rocky in peril, the brothers become geographically estranged, but never divided at heart. Years later, a crime divides their hometown but brings them back together.

The small Virginia town of Spencerville is filled with an eclectic cast of characters that keeps the tale moving at a brisk pace, even after Paul’s early departure from the narrative scene. This is a dark story of a dysfunctional crew, from the cantankerous family patriarch and his young wife, the religious and submissive Mrs. Askew, to the horsey debutante and seductress Patricia Culver and Paul’s fragile soul mate, Leigh. 

Without spoiling the ending of this compelling page-turner, it can be said that Tarkington’s impressive first novel achieves every author’s goal: Once you start reading, you can’t stop. And as an added bonus for Neil Young fans, Tarkington’s riveting tale provides plenty of classic rock riffs, too.

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

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, December 2015

Decades after fleeing Japan and building a new life in America, Amaterasu Takahashi is confronted by a man claiming to be a missing piece of her past. Badly scarred and bearing a trove of family secrets, he stands on her doorstep claiming to be her grandson, Hideo, who died in the bombing at Nagasaki along with Ama’s daughter, Yuko. Ama knows her family is dead; she had spent countless hours searching the rubble and hospitals with her husband, Kenzo. She doesn’t believe the man at the door.

His proof of identity is a collection of sealed letters that carry not only the story of Hideo’s survival and how he came to find her in the States, but also the secrets of a seemingly ordinary family, opening up wounds Ama had long tried to pretend were healed. As chapters alternate between the past and the present, Ama confronts feelings of guilt and grief over her losses as well as hope that the future might hold more than loneliness.

In her debut novel, journalist Jackie Copleton—who lived in Nagasaki for two years—manages to sensitively portray Japanese culture as well as the utter horror and devastation of August 9, 1945, an angle often unexplored in Western writing. Characterized by heartache, memories and promise, A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding is a gripping narrative about family and loss that will appeal to readers of historical and literary fiction.

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Few debut novels get the kind of attention—and the multi-million dollar advance—that Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire has. But to say that this book deserves the buzz understates what is hardly an understated accomplishment. Like the work of other literary masters (Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace and Donna Tartt are just a few of the novelists worth drawing comparisons to), this is a book that will endure in many ways.

On the surface level, City on Fire is a mystery. New York City, New Years Eve, as the year turns to 1977: a girl, Sam Cicciaro, is shot in Central Park. While this is the inciting incident—an old detective grows obsessed with the case; a washed-up journalist tries to find meaning through his own investigation—the narrative strays far and wide. It oscillates around New York City, through the perspectives of pretty much every character related to the case. Hallberg crafts men and women both gay and straight, black and white, young and old—all with such precision and empathy that even the villains feel alive and complexly human.

One of the main plotlines follows a rich and powerful family of Manhattanites, glancingly reminiscent of Salinger’s Glass family. Another trudges in the grime and bohemian color of the Lower East Side’s punk-rock scene, where Patti Smith and post-humanism reign supreme. Interspersed between these temporally and geographically expansive sections are found-writing type documents: hand-written journal entries, psychological profiles, collaged fanzines. It’s a large novel that takes its time giving each character attention, and is full of stylistic innovation, but never gets too cute with its doses of post-modern artifice. The connections arise and converge, ultimately culminating in the blackout of 1977 and a novel that triumphs over both New York City and stories themselves.

But like Roberto Bolaño’s magnum opus, 2666, the story itself is not propelled by plot or incident, but by the details. What Hallberg has achieved is subtlety original, considering how much fun it is to read the cinematic collection of scenes and follow the numerous story arcs. Through this panorama of characters, Hallberg explores what it means to feel alone in a city of millions. And while it certainly is long, what will last about this book is a sense of empathy for myriad multicolored lives, a feeling that stays in the heart even after having put down the book.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Garth Risk Hallberg about City on Fire.