In space, in that weightless environment, any disruption to an object’s proper orbit can result in catastrophe. Within families, those often insular orbits of individuals, the loss of the center causes a similar spiraling out of control. In Everything I Never Told You by first-time novelist Celeste Ng, the Lee family is unanchored by sudden tragedy and then undone slowly by recriminations and regrets.

Like many parents, Marilyn and James Lee carry past hurts and insecurities with them, shaping their children to embody what remains unfulfilled in them. Their daughter Lydia especially “absorbed her parents’ dreams.” The discovery of her body in a lake in their small Ohio town answers none of the family’s questions as to what happened.

Grief binds Marilyn, James and their two other children, Nath and Hannah, but it also threatens to rend them completely. Ng writes lyrically about the interior lives of each member of the Lee family: the father, a still self-conscious son of Chinese immigrants who is desperate to belong; the beautiful white mother, an escapee from a closeted life prescribed for her by her own mother; and their children, the oldest (Nath) frustrated, the middle (Lydia) suffocated, and the youngest (Hannah) ignored. Lydia remains an enigma for much of the novel as Ng pieces the how and why of her death together through her family’s knowledge (of lack thereof) first, and then Lydia’s own perspective near the end. No pain is glossed over, no unpleasantness swept aside. The fracture that Lydia’s death has created splits open the hairline crack already running through her family. Ng’s deftness with detail draws the reader close into the family’s struggle to understand.

While Ng is an eloquent and thoughtful writer, the many shifts from the past to present (the novel is set in the 1970s) can disrupt the continuity at times. But her pinpoint precision on the feelings and actions after loss make for a very strong and emotional debut that will linger in the mind.

Stories of human survival and hope after an apocalyptic event are well worn at this point. As a result, the themes and tropes of these tales often feel so trodden and predictable that they become little more than echoes. Then, there are stories like California.

In the near future, civilization as Cal and Frida know it has crumbled. Hoping for a new life, they flee the ruined city of Los Angeles and settle in a small shed in the wilderness, carving out the best life they can with what little they have. It’s hard, but they have each other, and that seems comfort enough—until Frida discovers she’s pregnant.

Fearing what might happen if they try to survive the pregnancy alone, Cal and Frida set out for a mysterious nearby settlement, but when they arrive, it becomes clear that this hoped-for sanctuary is instead a world where it seems no one can be trusted.

The real secret to the greatness of California, aside from its fully realized characters and thoughtful narration, is an attention to detail that draws you immediately into Edan Lepucki’s mysterious new world. This isn’t a place of easy answers, but it is a place of layered, constantly unfolding ones. Frida and Cal’s journey is a web of secrets, fears and truths old and new, and Lepucki deftly creates the sense that these elements are simultaneously happening all at once and feeding off each other, crafting a truly unpredictable tale of human frailty and determination. Here, the world ends messily, like an ugly relationship, and the ways in which the characters have to put their lives back together are equally fractured. The result is not only a singular post-apocalyptic novel, but a debut you won’t want to miss. California will lure you in with its mysteries, seduce you with its secrets and haunt you long after you’ve finished it.

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

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.