Slava Gelman has it made in Boris Fishman’s debut, The Replacement Life. With a junior staff position at a prestigious literary magazine, a Manhattan apartment and an assimilated American girlfriend, he’s more than just miles away from his childhood in Minsk or the Russian enclave in Brooklyn where the rest of his family lives. But when Slava is woken by an early morning phone call from his mother telling him his grandmother has died, his carefully constructed life threatens to come crashing down around him.

Self-effacing and quiet, Slava’s grandmother was a Holocaust survivor who chose not to share the stories of her wartime experience in the Minsk ghetto. After her funeral, Slava’s grandfather, Yevgeny, who spent the war in hiding, pressures Slava into falsifying a restitution letter to the German government based on his wife’s experience. Once other friends and neighbors hear what Slava has done, they come with similar requests, convinced that their experience as Jews and as second-class citizens in the Soviet Union entitles them to a similar payout, even if they didn’t spend the war in camps or ghettos. Slava is consumed with guilt over not knowing his grandmother’s story, though he is torn between wanting to help and a kind of moral disgust at his neighbors who want to profit from tragedy. At the same time, he knows the letters are his best work, better than anything he’s written for the magazine. Most troubling of all is his nagging suspicion that this fraud may be just. Perhaps all suffering should be rewarded.

The Replacement Life is beautifully written and occasionally quite funny, but the novel struggles in finding the right balance between Slava’s moral dilemma and the more quotidian depictions of love and work. Fishman was inspired by his grandmother’s life and real-life instances of Russian immigrants forging restitution requests, elements which offer an additional layer to the already complicated paradox of remaining loyal to one’s community while moving bravely into a new world. 

Literature is replete with unreliable narrators, but you’ve never encountered an unreliable narrator like the one in Emma Healey’s mournful and luminous debut novel, Elizabeth Is Missing. Maud Horsham isn’t remotely evil. She’s not pathologically dishonest, nor does she have some deep, dark secret to hide. Her unreliability comes simply from the fact that she’s elderly and her memory is failing fast. On top of this, she’s absolutely sure that her friend Elizabeth is missing.

Dementia can’t keep Maud from trying to find her missing friend in this vivid debut.

We learn that Elizabeth isn’t exactly missing, at least not in the way that Maud insists that she is. The person who’s missing is Maud’s adored older sister Sukey, and Sukey has been missing since World War II. Maud was a teenager then. Her present-day dementia makes her grief and longing for both women bleed into each other. Her past life is so dominated by Sukey’s disappearance that Maud’s memories of her own happy enough marriage and young motherhood barely register.

Other than this, Maud has lived an ordinary life in an ordinary English suburb. She’s like any other pensioner whose recall is getting dicey. She has a care­giver who drops by. Her daughter and granddaughter also look after her. Her son comes over from Germany to see her when he feels like it.

Maud’s deterioration makes her sympathetic and exasperating by turns—the reader does wish she’d stop shouting and breaking things for no reason, stop getting lost and try to remember what she’s just been told a second ago. But it also makes her sad and a little funny, which she’s aware of. You figure that when she was a younger woman she was kind, plucky and resourceful.

What’s truly astonishing about the book is that its author—a web administrator at the University of East Anglia—isn’t even 30 years old. How can she know what it’s like for a person to lose herself, bit by bit? How can her descriptions of World War II, with all the shabbiness and rationing and black-market intrigue, be so vivid? Of course, Healey is able to imagine and empathize on such a level because she’s simply a brilliant writer. Let’s hope we hear much more from her over the years.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Emma Healey for this book.

With daily news headlines detailing the tragedies that can unfold when a battle-weary soldier returns home from war, Las Vegas author Laura McBride’s first novel, We Are Called to Rise, is hauntingly timely.

Indeed, McBride’s pitch-perfect narrative of two broken young veterans, an imploding marriage and the heartbreak of a young immigrant boy unfolds quietly, with a plain­spoken realism that beckons readers along from page one.

In chapters featuring alternating voices of the novel’s primary characters—no small literary feat—we hear the stories of Avis, a middle-aged woman whose husband has recently left her; Roberta, a tireless champion of homeless and abused children; Bashkim, an Albanian immigrant boy in the third grade; and Bashkim’s pen-pal Luis, an Iraq War army veteran who is hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington.

Clinging desperately to memories of better days, Bashkim’s struggling immigrant family faces formidable challenges in their new American homeland. The troubled patriarch drives a decrepit ice cream truck, barely paying the bills and forever lamenting the injustice that led to him spending time in an Albanian prison. Then a routine traffic stop escalates into a gut-wrenching tragedy that links the disparate stories.

Flashbacks convey bleak depictions of life during wartime, and a seemingly unending string of bad luck follows many of the characters in this bittersweet tale. In spite of this, We Are Called to Rise pays homage to the words first penned by poet Emily Dickinson that serve as its title, reminding us that one’s courage and character are often writ large during the darkest of days.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Richard Haddon has screwed up royally with his wife, and he’ll do anything to get her back.

Richard, a British contemporary artist, met his near-perfect French wife while enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design. From the moment he spotted Anne-Laure de Bourigeaud, Richard was convinced that she was the woman for him. Shortly after they married, Anne became pregnant, and their relationship served as the inspiration for one of Richard’s greatest paintings, “The Blue Bear.”

But seven years have passed, and while Richard hasn’t fallen out of love with his wife, his gaze has certainly wandered. So too has his focus on art; while Richard once used his art as a statement, he has now resorted to commercial paintings—and has sold “The Blue Bear,” which once meant so much to the couple. As his first solo show opens in a Parisian gallery, the distance between Richard and Anne is noticeable, although he’s the only half of the couple who knows the full extent of his dalliance. Anne seems to be patiently waiting for her husband to return his focus to their marriage.

When she uncovers Richard’s relationship with an American, though, Anne sends her husband packing and resolves not to let her sadness show. Richard, meanwhile, is determined to demonstrate his remorse and regret in the hope of recovering what the couple once had.

The basic plotline of this story—a couple falls in love, one cheats and then they struggle to determine what comes next—isn’t unusual. But in I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, first-time novelist Courtney Maum has crafted the story of a relationship so believable, so realistic that readers will be left wondering until the last minute whether the couple will reunite.

Maum, whose years in France (and marriage to a Frenchman) color the book, is a brand strategist and humor columnist. But the razor-sharp writing and character insights of I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You suggest that readers have much to look forward to from this talented storyteller.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s a great time for tales of humanity coming to a horrible end (and for those who love to read about it). Between plagues, societal implosions, alien incursions and self-inflicted technological destruction—well, let’s just say it’s enough to make the dichotomy proposed in Robert Frost’s 1920 poem, “Fire and Ice,” seem downright quaint in comparison.

Sure, the nuclear-powered holocaust narrative, which blossomed along with the mushroom clouds at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and reigned supreme for decades, count as “fire,” and many of the asteroid hits and global warming scenarios can be slotted on the side of “ice,” but they have been joined, if not supplanted over the last decade by a more metaphorical (and thus outlandish) account of end times: the zombie apocalypse. In an effort to keep the zombie tale fresh, there have been plenty of tweaks in type (faster, smarter, etc.), cause (fungus, sleeplessness, etc.) and focus (forget the zombies, it’s the surviving humans who are the monsters!). As a result, the actual core horror of the zombie tale—that combination of the unknown mixed with a mounting hopelessness—has been lost. With Bird Box, Josh Malerman returns the reader to that thrilling dread of yesteryear by keeping his narrative simple and refusing to allow the “other” in his tale to become known.

With the exception of two brief chapters, Bird Box cleaves to the perspective of Malorie. In alternating chapters, her present and recent past unfold. In the present, she’s a harsh, taciturn parent to two four-year-olds, Boy and Girl, whom she has trained since birth to rely on their hearing to an almost supernatural degree. Along with her children, Malorie has hidden in a house, never venturing outside without a blindfold, until now, when she’s decided to make a long-postponed journey to a possible refuge. The chapters of her past gradually reveal how her present situation came to be, how something changed (or arrived) and started to drive whomever sees it violently mad. Even a glimpse does the trick. In these chapters, a pregnant Malorie finds refuge in a house of survivors as they struggle to cope with a decidedly dire new world order.

Malerman’s prose is compelling, but what helps make Bird Box memorable is the sheer, uncompromising menace of the unseen threat throughout. How do you come to terms with—let alone combat—a danger you don’t dare perceive? Malerman short-circuits a coping mechanism so basic the reader can’t help but share in the resulting discombobulation of the characters. And in the process, he imbues this particular tale of survival with something so many of its contemporaries lack—a lingering sense of horror that, no matter how hard one tries, refuses to be fully seen.

Terms & Conditions, the first novel from promising author Robert Glancy, is a mystery tale unraveled through the frequent use of footnotes. While this may not seem like the pitch for an engrossing storyline, Glancy’s witty tone and keen insight into human nature help make this book not just readable but highly enjoyable.*

We meet the narrator, Frank Shaw, as he is awakening in a hospital bed after a car crash. Suffering from temporary amnesia, he does not recognize his own wife and brother, nor does he remember much at all about his pre-crash life. If this plot seems like a soap-opera cliché, fear not—Frank’s humor as he notes the absurdity of the situation is immediately apparent, and this helps make him a character well worth exploring.

Slowly the reader, along with Frank, learns about his pre-accident life, including his monotonous job as a contract lawyer (hence the attraction to footnotes), his marriage to the beautiful but icy Alice, and his relationship with his corpulent and obnoxious brother Oscar, for whom he works at the family firm. As might be expected, Frank comes to realize things in his life are not as they appear; his journey, while always funny, also proves to be quite poignant.

One of the most compelling characters in the book, Frank’s younger brother, Malc, appears mostly through email correspondence. A free spirit indulging his wanderlust in countries across the globe, Malcom acts as a bit of a sage for Frank, constantly touting his lifelong philosophy: “F___ this.” If Shaw writes another novel, I’d love to see Malc as a main character.

The main criticism to be noted here comes toward the end, when the events immediately preceding Frank’s accident are described. The timeline here gets a bit muddied, and readers may want more detail. But the conclusion (which adheres to Malc’s unorthodox philosophy) is wholly satisfying.

*And the footnotes are, in fact, one of the most amusing aspects of the book.

Sensitive readers should be warned that much of the subject matter of Cynthia Bond’s debut novel, Ruby, is unflinchingly raw, grim and darkly disturbing—in particular, the ritual sexual abuse of children in a voodoo-infested rural Texas town. There were times when the evils unfolding on the pages of Bond’s horrifying—albeit impeccably crafted—story of one woman’s survival made it difficult for this reviewer to continue reading.

But those who have the stomach to forge ahead will be richly rewarded, as Ruby is undoubtedly the early work of a master storyteller whose literary lyricism is nothing short of pitch perfect. Despite the novel’s haunting subject matter, the amazing story of Ruby Bell is also infused with hope and light. While the tale is often unpacked in flashbacks featuring Ruby’s devastating childhood memories, the heart of the novel is the unfolding love story between Ruby and the noble and kind-hearted Ephram Jennings.

The year is 1963, and Ruby has returned to Liberty Township, Texas, after a debauched sabbatical in New York City, where after a hardscrabble start as a bisexual prostitute, she ultimately honed an exotic, glamorous and sanguine veneer as the plucky plaything of the rich and famous.

But Ruby’s urbane sophistication and designer clothes are not enough to ward off the haints and horrors that plague this fragile and psychologically damaged young woman upon her return to Liberty Township, where she is alternately shunned and sexually abused. Only Ephram, who has been raised by his stalwart and protective older sister Celia, is determined to save her. As Bond writes, “Ruby blinked and in an instant the past eleven years washed down her cheeks. Ephram led her back into the house and sat her on the edge of the bed. The day was slipping into evening. She looked at the where she had lived for over a decade. Late. When, she wondered, had it become so late?”

Most readers will find themselves drawn to Ruby despite the darkness of its heroine’s memories and experiences. Especially delightful are Bond’s spirited contingent of church ladies, whose laugh-out-loud shenanigans served up alongside a slice of Celia’s heavenly angel cake provide a welcome counterpoint to the darkness in this impressive debut novel.

A beehive is a place of order, control, maybe even oppression. In Laline Paull’s debut novel, The Bees, Flora 717 is a sterile worker bee from the lowest caste of an orchard hive. Like her sisters, she is bound by the motto to accept, obey and serve. But during a period of famine and environmental crisis, Flora is asked to take on new tasks: first, feeding the newborns in the hive’s nursery and then becoming a forager, flying freely in search of pollen and nectar. Her size and strength make her a formidable worker, and she proves to be a quick learner. But each change in role brings Flora access to new wisdom about the hive—and eventually puts her in conflict with the Queen, as well as the fertility police and the priestesses, an elite group of bees closest to the queen who keep the hive in order. Soon, Flora must decide where her loyalties lie and whether blind obedience to the rules is really in the best interest of her community.

Dystopian fiction only works when there is a character who is able to see the cracks in the system, and Flora is the perfect heroine: resourceful, brave and able to take the kinds of chances that her sisters cannot, a reminder that even nature is ever-changing. Paull has created a credible version of the complex world of the bee: the stunningly complicated hive—part palace, part convent—the countryside, filled with flowers aching to be pollinated, and the Myriad, or foes of the bee, including crows, spiders, wasps and, of course, people. Most impressive of all, even the most extreme actions and concepts in the novel—the expulsion of the drones, the fertility police, the hive mind—are true to known bee behavior, with some poetic license, of course. 

Readers may recognize elements drawn from the work of Atwood, Orwell and even The Hunger Games, but The Bees is very much its own creation: a dystopian thriller, a love story and a plea for the plight of the honeybees. The Bees is a tremendous work of literature, told with suspense and passion. You will never look at the activity in your flower garden the same way again.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Laline Paull about The Bees.

Every now and then, a reader stumbles across a debut novelist and thinks to herself: What took you so long? Bret Anthony Johnston—­current Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University and named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 following the publication of his 2004 short story collection—is such an author. His first novel is so spellbinding, so moving, that one’s only complaint is that we had to wait 10 years to read it.

Remember Me Like This opens with a surprise: It begins where most novels would have ended. We meet the Campbells four years after the traumatic ordeal of losing their then 11-year-old son, Justin, to a kidnapper. Laura and Eric (along with their youngest son Griff) are learning how to claw their way out from the darkness of grief. Then they receive the extraordinary news that Justin is coming home.

Even then, Johnston doesn’t focus his novel on the facts behind Justin’s disappearance, but keeps the focus on the repercussions of the family’s loss rather than its details. Though they never stopped combing the Corpus Christi sand dunes or canvassing the town with “missing” flyers, each family member turned to distractions to cope with their grief. Laura has become a shadow of herself, spending most of her time and energy volunteering at Sea Lab, where she cares for hurt or sick marine life. Eric—a high school history teacher who still loves Laura but is unable to connect with her—has found solace in the arms of travel agent Tracy. Griff, now entering his teenage years and unable to bridge the gap between his parents, focuses his energy on skateboarding and daydreams about his best friend, Fiona.

Yet it is the way Johnston reveals Justin’s painful ordeal in increments and through the eyes and ears of his family members that makes this tale so emotionally powerful. Johnston is a master at creating honest portraits of family members that could easily be your neighbor. Make no mistake about it: Bret Anthony Johnston is a writer to watch.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Simon Wroe is a former chef, so it’s no surprise that he set his debut novel in a kitchen. What is surprising about Chop Chop, though, is how little Wroe lets this fiendish little book get bogged down in the details of its setting. It’s very much about the chaotic life of a kitchen, but this darkly comic narrative covers so much more, and the result is addictively entertaining.

Wroe’s unnamed narrator (dubbed “Monocle” by his coworkers because of an English degree he isn’t using) sets out for the excitement of London after university and quickly finds himself desperate for a way to pay his rent. He takes a job at a past-its-prime restaurant called The Swan, doing grunt work. It’s a place where anything can happen, and The Swan’s outrageous characters—barbaric head chef Bob, Racist Dave, Ramilov and the beguiling Harmony—push and pull Monocle in different directions, from torture to romance to devilish pranks. Monocle finds himself swept into a world that’s as much battleground as it is kitchen, even as he’s tormented by his past and his parents’ crumbling marriage.

Wroe not only refuses to glamorize what goes on behind this restaurant’s kitchen door, but also refuses to tell his tale with anything but a kind of impish brutality. Bob isn’t just a taskmaster. He’s a slavedriver. Harmony isn’t just a crush. She’s a dream girl. Ramilov isn’t just a comrade in arms. He’s a lifesaver. Everything is amplified in this cramped, sweaty little space, but Wroe still leaves plenty of room for the unexpected, the uncomfortable and the uncommonly funny.

Chop Chop might be fiction, but the truth of the author’s experience shines through. The result is a compelling debut from a mischievous new voice.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author Heather Brittain Bergstrom has won awards for her short fiction from the Chicago Tribune and Atlantic Monthly, among others. Her outstanding debut novel, Steal the North, is almost guaranteed to add to Bergstrom’s award collection. Narrated from multiple perspectives, the novel is a heartbreaking tale of family secrets, unrequited love and the unbreakable bond of family. 

Sixteen-year-old Emmy Nolan is a sheltered only child living with her mother in Sacramento, California. Emmy knows very little about her mother Kate’s childhood, with good reason: Kate wishes to leave her past in the past. Until the day Kate receives a phone call from her estranged sister, Beth, summoning Emmy to her home in rural Washington—the town Kate had fled 15 years earlier, with baby Emmy, after her boyfriend abandoned her and her own father and the fundamentalist church they attended shunned her. 

The passion, spiritual connection and once-in-a-lifetime love that Reuben and Emmy share makes the reader’s heart ache—and could secure Steal the North a spot on the bookshelves of discerning teens. 

But now Beth, the only person who stood up for Kate during that time, is begging for her help. She is pregnant for what she believes is the final time; Beth and her husband Matt have experienced too many miscarriages to count during their marriage. She wants Kate to send Emmy to participate in a faith healing ceremony to help ensure a safe delivery. 

Though angry with her mother for keeping secrets and dubious about moving in with an aunt she doesn’t remember, Emmy reluctantly goes. While living with Matt and Beth, she makes discoveries about her mother’s past that are painful, but her life is broadened and awakened in ways that she had never imagined. Bergstrom’s knowledge of eastern Washington, the Colville and Yakama Reservations and the lives of the Native Americans who live there are central to this novel—especially her careful construction of Emmy’s relationship with Reuben Tonasket, the Native American who lives in the trailer next door. The passion, spiritual connection and once-in-a-lifetime love that Reuben and Emmy share makes the reader’s heart ache—and could secure Steal the North a spot on the bookshelves of discerning teens. 

Bergstrom has delivered a debut novel with deep emotional ties, linking the reader to Emmy as she navigated her relationship with Reuben, struggled to understand her mother’s past and discovered her own identity. I ached for Emmy as I used up the last of my tissues, and I trust that anyone who embarks on this journey will do the same. 

In Vintage, author and secondhand store enthusiast Susan Gloss weaves together the lives of three very different women in a story filled with humor and heart.

Violet Turner, the 30-something proprietor of Hourglass Vintage, has a passion for making something out of the hand life has dealt. Growing up in small-town Wisconsin, she was always a bit offbeat but found safety in dating a popular boy. With dogged determination, Violet continued to live the life she thought she should live. But when she realized that she wanted more from life and that her husband was a good-for-nothing alcoholic, Violet took off for the state capital and a new life.

That’s exactly what she’s found in Madison, with her vintage-focused consignment shop drawing clientele from the university and the city’s eclectic professional community alike. It also draws in 18-year-old high-school graduate April Morgan, who is five months pregnant and is selling the vintage wedding dress she won’t need after breaking things off with her fiancé. April seems an unlikely companion for Violet, but regular customer Betsy, an elderly woman whose friendship with Violet is nearly familial, sees that the pair needs each other. Indian immigrant Amithi Singh also finds comfort in the shop and its proprietor, following a betrayal that has left her questioning her adult life.

Vintage is a sweet and comforting debut that celebrates the families we make. It will remind readers not only that they are never alone, but also that happiness often returns when it seems all hope is gone.