Fiction book reviews archive | Page 7 of 451

In Kate Weinberg’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Her, a young British woman ironically named Vita suffers from a ghastly, debilitating condition that doctors have no name for. She calls its worst symptom, a crushing tornado of pain and helplessness, The Pit. Because Vita’s condition is unidentifiable, doctors won’t attempt to treat it. From there comes the diagnosis that gives the book its title.

The reader might think that Vita’s mysterious illness has something to do with the painful events in her past: the deaths of her mother and sister, a wicked stepmother, the boyfriend who got away, a stuttering career in the performing arts. Vita lives in a weirdly laid out basement apartment with Max, a surgeon who cares for her but too often treats her like one of his “really sick” patients. She spends much time contemplating her goldfish, Whitney Houston, and she’s visited now and then by the ghost of Renaissance soldier and poet Luigi da Porto. (He was the author of the original Romeo and Juliet, which Shakespeare pinched later on. Vita wrote a screenplay about him that went nowhere). Just as Whitney spins in her goldfish bowl, Vita spins in her unhappiness, and Luigi spins in his memories of the woman who jilted him after he came back as broken from war as Vita is broken from her life.

Then, one day there’s a leak from the upstairs apartment. Max isn’t home, and Vita must leave her bed to interact with her neighbors, the ebullient and not-quite-elderly Mrs. Rothwell, and Jesse, an American who helps Mrs. Rothwell around the house. Vita befriends both immediately. Is this her first step on the path to health?

Weinberg, author of The Truants, packs a lot into this slender novel. There’s rage at a medical establishment that won’t take women’s pain seriously, and a cargo ship’s tonnage of familial trauma. But there’s also the life-enhancing, life-saving power of love and friendship, and the strength of Vita’s unquenchable need to be healthy in body and mind. Maybe her name isn’t so ironic after all.

Kate Weinberg, author of The Truants, tells the story of a woman with an illness that doctors can’t identify, with rage at the lack of belief in women’s pain as well as hope for the life-saving power of love and friendship.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

They Dream in Gold

Review by Melissa Brown

by Melissa Brown

Playwright and director Mai Sennaar’s debut novel, They Dream in Gold, crackles. Her prose is elemental, flowing like a river at times, then burning like fire, heightening the reader’s senses until all five mingle into one. Over the course of 400 pages, Sennaar moves swiftly back and forth across continents and generations to tell a vividly realized story of family, identity and love.

Mansour, a child first of Senegal and then of the world, exudes music and wants to make his mark as a musician. Mama Eva, who raised Mansour and keeps her own secrets, aspires to culinary heights. And Bonnie, an only child raised by her grandmother, is entranced by Mansour’s sound on a demo CD before she ever meets him. They all have, as Sennaar writes, “a need for a life of wonder.” After Mansour goes missing while on tour in Spain, the lives of the women who love him are strung painfully taut as they wait for news: Back in her crumbling mansion in Switzerland, Mama Eva worries as she cooks for her long-awaited restaurant’s opening day, while pregnant Bonnie broods and paces.

They Dream in Gold wends from Mama Eva’s 1940s youth in Dakar to Bonnie and Mansour’s first meeting in 1960s New York City, to a Brazilian music festival in the middle of Carnival where Mansour’s star is born. The novel’s five parts flow in and out of each character’s past and present, examining the people who have shaped them, although some side characters are less compelling. Bonnie, Mansour and Mama Eva have each been orphaned in different ways and are looking for home, a place to stay and belong. Unreserved and confident, Sennaar’s piercing narrative voice reverberates through a novel pulsing with all the intensity it takes to compose a life and make it sing.

Mai Sennaar’s prose in They Dream in Gold is elemental, flowing like a river at times, then burning like fire, heightening the reader’s senses until all five mingle into one.

Fiction, Historical Fiction, Popular Fiction

The Seventh Veil of Salome

Review by Matthew Jackson

by Matthew Jackson

There is magic in the work of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, even when the story she’s pursuing isn’t overtly magical. The genre-bending novelist (Mexican Gothic, Silver Nitrate) infuses every page with a sense of mythic power, ensuring that readers will be gripped, while also channeling the feeling of a fairy tale that could turn dark at any moment. With The Seventh Veil of Salome, Moreno-Garcia turns that remarkable gift to a Hollywood story and conjures another piece of prose magic.

Inspired by the biblical legend of Salome and its long cultural trail, the story focuses on three women. Vera Larios is unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight when she nabs the leading role in The Seventh Veil of Salome, the latest sword-and-sandal epic to emerge from the Technicolor machine of 1950s Hollywood. Nancy Hartley, an aspiring actress who’s so far been consigned to bit parts, is instantly filled with fury, believing the role to be hers. Then there’s Salome herself, who is caught in the middle of a power struggle in the first century while falling in love with a mysterious and rebellious preacher who threatens to bring turmoil to Galilee.

As each narrative moves forward, Moreno-Garcia captures her characters’ strikingly vivid emotions—Vera’s longing for creative transcendence, Nancy’s lust for success and Salome’s tortured matrix of desire and duty—all while examining the power structures and influences, often male, that threaten to box them in. Each of these women wants something, and their desires and fears weave together across the story, driven by the evocative and carefully structured prose, which is so precise that it’s impossible to mistake one woman’s story for another even as they mirror and complement one another. Vera’s story is not Salome’s, even as she’s playing Salome. Neither is Nancy’s, even as her own desire for agency and power turns darker. Instead, Moreno-Garcia leads readers to question how the legend of Salome has informed our view of driven, creative, seductive, influential women through the ages. It’s an ambitious idea, and one the author captures without ever losing the book’s vivid drive.

The Seventh Veil of Salome is another triumph from Moreno-Garcia, a page-turning historical drama with mythic overtones that will please readers of her realistic fiction and her more fantastical work alike.

The Seventh Veil of Salome is another triumph from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a page-turning historical drama with mythic overtones that will please readers of her realistic fiction and her more fantastical work alike.

Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Historical Fiction

The Modern Fairies

Review by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

“Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots” and “Rumpelstiltskin” are to this day some of the first stories we hear as children—and as we learn from Clare Pollard’s witty, sexy, historical novel, The Modern Fairies, they were all the rage in the court of Louis XIV.

The Modern Fairies is loosely based on a group of real-life salonaires who met at the home of Madame Marie d’Aulnoy, a woman with a troubled past that included imprisonment and a childhood marriage to a cruel aristocrat. D’Aulnoy and her friends were the original collectors and disseminators of well-known folk tales a century before the Brothers Grimm. Just like the princesses in their stories, they inhabited a world of wicked mothers, murderous husbands, locked towers and poisoned fruit.

The women are joined by Charles Perrault, a wealthy widower and advisor to the king, who went on to great fame as one of the first authors to publish a collection of fairy tales. Over the course of a cold winter, certain details of these contes de fées prove a little too close to the realities of court. There is a spy at d’Aulnoy’s gatherings, and meetings become more dangerous as love letters are misdirected, husbands discover cheating wives, and both the local clergy and the king’s chief of police are put on high alert for any whiff of scandal.

The Modern Fairies is arranged as a series of stories within stories, each fairy tale as light as a bonbon yet cleverly revealing aspects of the teller’s situation, whether a violent husband, younger lover or jealous rival. An all-knowing narrator, perhaps Pollard herself, pops up to offer commentary on the societal restrictions experienced by these noblewomen and to reflect on the subversive ties between tales told and lives lived. An award-winning poet and translator, Pollard has great fun with these stories and with the gossip, the flirtations and the sheer amount of sex at the court of Versailles. She demonstrates, too, how important these women were for documenting, embellishing and preserving a wealth of stories, and like them, plays her part in translating an oral tradition into a written one that we can continue to delight in.

An award-winning poet and translator, Clare Pollard has great fun with these cleverly revealing fairy tales told amid gossip, flirtations and sex at the court of Versailles.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Gothic Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Gothic Fiction Debut Fiction

Smothermoss

Review by Freya Sachs

by Freya Sachs

Alisa Alering’s debut, Smothermoss, is a novel of violence, trust and the landscape of Appalachia. The mountains and hollows, the moss, quartz, water and trees are all painted in their full aliveness.

In the 1980s, Sheila, Angie and their mother are trying to figure out how to survive. Working long shifts at the asylum, their mother is rarely present, and while the two sisters share a small room, their diverging curiosities, interests and ways of being make it hard for them to relate to and understand each other. Sheila goes to work, she worries, she feeds the rabbits. Angie explores, she knows the neighbors, and she draws mysterious creatures on her own deck of tarot cards which almost seem to self-animate.

The community shifts when two female hikers are murdered on the Appalachian Trail, and worry arises that the murderer has yet to leave the area. The secrets of what happened hide in the landscape. As the novel progresses, the land takes over—the mountains crack and communicate, and the rocks and stones have stories to tell.

In many ways, Smothermoss resembles a Southern gothic fairy tale, with elements—like the invisible rope attached to Sheila’s neck—that require a certain suspension of disbelief, and the setting of the 1980s South, a challenging place to find one’s voice. Ultimately, the story carries you away, with brief chapters, crisp scenes and high stakes. Each scene builds in tension and a sense of wonder, surprising you with the direction these sisters’ future may take.

Alisa Alering paints the mountains, hollows, moss and quartz of the Appalachian landscape in all their full aliveness in Smothermoss, their gothic debut.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Someone Like Us

Review by Michael Magras

by Michael Magras

One of the many challenges of being an immigrant is how, as your perception adjusts to life in a new land, it can begin to feel like you’ve lost touch with your homeland. Dinaw Mengestu plays with this dynamic in Someone Like Us, his subtle, brilliant new novel about family secrets.

The book’s protagonist is Mamush, a novelist and journalist of Ethiopian heritage who was born and raised in the U.S. He has become well-known for writing articles about “struggling but ultimately tenacious immigrants in America” and other weighty topics such as border conflicts, refugee crises and a militia leader in eastern Congo. He now lives north of Paris with his photographer wife (the book includes some of her photographs) and their 2-year-old son.

Mamush returns to the U.S. for the first time in years when he receives word from his mother, now living in a northern Virginia community “popular with retired middle-class immigrants like her,” that Samuel, a man Mamush knew as a close family friend, has died. He learns that Samuel may, or may not, have been his father.

That’s only the start of the mysteries Mengestu explores. Always the journalist, Mamush travels to Chicago to investigate Samuel’s past, including time spent in jail and a scheme for “building a cab company for people trapped in the wrong place.” And Mengestu adds an additional, beguiling wrinkle: While Mamush conducts his inquiries, he has imagined conversations with the deceased Samuel, a fabulist touch that allows for philosophical discussions on the desire to belong and the power of storytelling.

That’s the great achievement of this book. Aside from being a wonderful read, it’s a tribute to the majesty of storytelling and its ability to help one make sense of the world. A decade has passed since Mengestu’s last novel, the equally exceptional All Our Names. Someone Like Us is the welcome return of a vitally important voice in modern American literature.

A decade after Dinaw Mengestu’s equally exceptional All Our Names, Someone Like Us is the welcome return of a vitally important voice in modern American literature.

Coming of Age, Debut Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Debut Fiction Coming of Age

Pearl

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

by Sarah McCraw Crow

Sian Hughes’ debut novel, Pearl, offers a coming-of-age story set in rural England, one that reverberates with grief and longing, but also a wry humor.

As the novel opens, narrator Marianne and her teenage daughter, Susannah, are taking part in an ancient mourning ceremony and fair called the Wakes, in Marianne’s home village in Cheshire. It’s a ceremony that Marianne always attends, one that leads her to ponder the loss of her mother. When Marianne was 8, her mother walked out into the rain one fall day, forever leaving behind Marianne and the rest of their family.

Her mother’s unexplained disappearance has colored Marianne’s entire life—a mystery that she can’t move beyond. Marianne recounts her idyllic, idiosyncratic rural childhood in an old farmhouse with her creative mother, who sang folk songs and shared ancient stories. Later, during the bumpy, sad years after the disappearance, Marianne’s father Edward, a history professor, tries to patch together a life for Marianne and her younger brother, Joe. The adult Marianne narrates in an episodic, not-quite-linear fashion, looking back from early middle age to circle the mystery of her mother. The narrative is particularly strong in conveying the younger Marianne’s self-absorbed, mishap-filled adolescence, and her lurch into young adulthood.

Pearl was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, and is based in part on a medieval poem of the same title. Hughes, who is a poet herself, brings an attention to language and to the natural world that lends a beautiful vibrancy to her sentences and images. But there’s a droll sensibility here, too: Humor brightens grief-filled and difficult moments, such as an episode of postpartum psychosis. Pearl is also full of the gentle landscape and hallowed folklore of English village life, sometimes with a slightly gothic cast. To that end, each chapter opens with part of a nursery rhyme or nonsense poem (“As I went over the water, / The water went over me. I saw two little blackbirds / Sitting in a tree”). Throughout, the spirit of Marianne’s missing mother hovers, and this underlying mystery pulls the reader forward, though the story remains more immersive than propulsive.

Hughes has written a tender debut novel which, at its end, brings the reader back around to the grown Marianne at the Wakes, imbuing the festival with a lovely, redemptive new meaning.

Poet Sian Hughes brings vibrant language and a droll sensibility to her debut novel, Pearl, which explores a woman’s grief after losing her mother at 8 years old, set against the gentle landscape of English village life.

Fiction, Historical Fiction, Popular Fiction

Nicked

Review by Chika Gujarathi

by Chika Gujarathi

Acclaimed young adult author M.T. Anderson is now crossing into the world of adult fiction with Nicked. Inspired by true events from the year 1087, Nicked follows the heist of the 7-century-old corpse of St. Nicholas, in a thrilling and fast-moving international adventure narrated with wit and humor.

We begin in Bari, Italy, where a pox has afflicted half the town, with the other half in fear of soon joining the first. In response, the monks of St. Benedict take a week-long vigil to ask for healing, and their prayers are answered when a vision of St. Nicholas appears to a lowly monk named Nicephorus.

There is something endearing about Nicephorus which seems not of his time. Skeptical about the authenticity of his vision, which came after going without food and sleep, Nicephorus tries to dissuade the town officials from interpreting his dream as a direct order from the saint to steal his corpse from a church in Turkey. The leaders of Bari are undeterred, however, and when a relic hunter named Tyun shows up with his entourage, which includes a giant named Shchek and a dog-headed man named Reprobus, they eagerly engage his services.

Tyun, a handsome, fearless man of dubious morality, agrees to be the captain of the expedition in exchange for a huge sum of money, and the naive and pious Nicephorus is forced to join as witness and authenticator of the corpse. What follows is an epic adventure on land and sea, enjoyable not just for the Byzantine strategies and sabotage, but also because of the unpredictable pairing of passive Nicephorus with the aggressive and worldly Tyun. And there is a twist—of course there is, because what is an epic adventure without one!

Reminiscent of Indiana Jones and The Princess Bride, Nicked delivers an entertaining and grown-up adventure rooted in religion, humanity and friendship.

Inspired by true events from the year 1087, Nicked is a thrilling and fast-moving adventure in which a naive monk accompanies a relic hunter on a quest to steal the corpse of St. Nicholas.

Dystopian Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Dystopian Fiction

Hum

Review by Thane Tierney

by Thane Tierney

When it comes to dystopian futures, author Helen Phillips hits the American zeitgeist jackpot in her sixth novel, Hum. Cancel culture, job displacement due to AI, government overreach, deteriorating middle class wealth, missing children, declining air quality, bad breakfast cereals . . . the future’s so dark, you gotta wear a miner’s helmet.

In fiction, a trip out into nature almost always ends up with Job-like trials being visited upon the vacationers. Deliverance. 127 Hours. Jurassic Park. Into The Wild. Even Hansel and Gretel, for goodness’ sake. But despite these fictional precedents, when May makes a little extra money by submitting herself as a test subject for a surgical procedure that will disguise her features from the latest iteration of AI recognition software, she decides to take her family on vacation to the very expensive hyper-natural Botanical Garden. May hauls her two kids and her husband off into this Disney-fied paradise, requiring them, for good measure, to leave their phones and other communication devices at home so they can reap the full benefit of the experience.

And reap it they do.

The “hum” of the title is an AI-powered, jack-of-all-trades android, able to fill roles from a dental hygienist to a pop psychotherapist. If there was any question as to whether Phillips has seen 20 minutes into the future, in addition to dispensing whatever wisdom is appropriate to the moment, hums shill commercial products—unless you upgrade to the ad-free tier. Hum is, as dystopias go, reasonably breezy; it’s suitable for a coast-to-coast airline flight or an extended stay on the beach as an antidote to binge-watching the latest season of your favorite TV show. For those just dipping their toes into speculative fiction, the setting is relatable enough to not make you feel like (ahem) a stranger in a strange land.

For those just dipping their toes into speculative fiction, Helen Phillips’ prescient dystopia Hum is relatable enough not to make you feel like a stranger in a strange land.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

How to Leave the House

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

Nathan Newman’s first novel, How to Leave the House, tracks a young man named Natwest in his quest to reclaim a missing package. Inside the package: a large sex toy. Along the way, various players in Natwest’s small town step forward to share apparent wisdom with the young man, in scenes that range from ludicrous to genuinely philosophical. Through these loosely connected narratives, readers encounter a bawdy tale of the unseriousness of existence and the impossibility of knowing our neighbors.

Some chapters relate Natwest’s interior narrative (often obnoxiously laden with literary and artistic references), while others inhabit the minds of other characters, including his dentist (obsessed with painting mouths), his former English teacher (recovered from cancer and looking for sex) and his mother (proud of her son and desperate to show it). There are comedic and entertaining stories, especially one involving an egg fight and one in which a woman dances on her brother’s grave. Others are upsetting and cruel, like the chapter narrated by Natwest’s self-loathing ex-boyfriend, and another about the provocative internet activities of a girl named Lily.

In one storyline, an imam named Mishaal struggles with his love for classic cinema. He is enraptured by closeups of Ingrid Bergman, tortured by them as if he were having an illicit affair. When the imam encounters Natwest, he lectures the young man on binaries: “If it’s not Chaplin or Keaton, it’s Spielberg or Scorsese. If it’s not Spielberg or Scorsese, it’s Truffaut or Godard.” He insists that Natwest embrace his inner Keaton and stop trying to be a Chaplin.

Natwest’s story, along with everyone else’s, is bisected, torn between conflicting desires. The characters’ fates are ambivalent, not only in that we don’t know how things will work out for them, but also because none of them know how they’d like their stories to turn out. “I believe that a happy ending is at least as realistic as an unhappy one,” the imam says. Natwest is horrified by that idea, as the young man insists that unhappiness is “real shit.”

How to Leave the House is fiction as friction, designed for discomfort. This is a novel of dichotomies that beg to be challenged, with psychological spaces that desperately need transparency but are inherently, tragically closed off to each other.

Read our Q&A with Nathan Newman about How to Leave the House.

Nathan Newman’s debut is a bawdy tale of the unseriousness of existence and the impossibility of knowing our neighbors, set in a small town over the course of 24 hours.

Dystopian Fiction, Fiction, Popular Fiction

Burn

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

After their annual two-week hunting trip in northern Maine, lifelong friends Jess and Storey emerge from the wilderness to a bewildering new world. Bridges have been blown up, houses burned and villages abandoned—and there’s no internet connection to turn to for an explanation. Before their trip, there had been rumblings about militant groups that wanted Maine to secede, but the pair hadn’t been worried. Now, however, they find themselves “in the wake of a rolling catastrophe, moving behind some malign harvest whose shape and intention they could only guess.”

Peter Heller’s seventh novel, Burn, is one of his best: It’s full of heart and soul amid the bleak landscape (be forewarned, there are numerous bodies). In fact, even those who don’t normally turn to dystopian novels are likely to be completely captivated. Heller excels at writing about the wilderness, showcasing its might and beauty amid deadly situations, as he’s done before in books like The Last Ranger, The Guide and The River. Here, humans present the greatest danger as Jess and Storey attempt to make their way to safety, combining their intellects and survival skills in a way that brings to mind HBO’s The Last of Us, minus the fungus-infested zombies. Before long, these two men make a discovery that changes the calculus of their each and every move.

In addition to being a survival thriller and insurrectionist nightmare, this is also a story centered on friendship, how it is tested and how it perseveres. Burn interweaves the friends’ past and present lives with admirable flair, making each thread equally riveting. Some readers may find one surprising past relationship hard to buy, but even that doesn’t distract from the tight, authentic bond that forms the basis of this novel. “Love is attention,” Jess’s ex-wife once told him. “That is all you know on earth.” Over the course of the novel, Jess finally comes to understand what she means, making his emotional journey just as charged as the perilous landscape that he and Storey are forced to traverse. Burn is a propulsive tale that will keep readers on the edge of their seats from beginning to end.

Peter Heller’s seventh novel, Burn, is one of his best: It’s full of heart and soul amid the bleak landscape, and even those who don’t normally turn to dystopian novels are likely to be completely captivated.

Coming of Age, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Coming of Age

Catalina

Review by Eric A. Ponce

by Eric A. Ponce

College is supposed to be the best four years of your life. Throwing a Frisbee on the quad, spending late nights in the library, meeting people from all over the world—in the American imagination, college is a utopia. In Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s debut novel, Catalina, the titular character goes to Harvard and realizes that college can be a dystopia, too. As an undocumented person in the United States, Catalina Ituralde is forced to live her life quietly, mostly staying home with her two grandparents, who are also undocumented and at risk of deportation. But Catalina can’t avoid attention, or at least she doesn’t want to. An adventurous free spirit, she wants to live life to the fullest. She wants to fall in love and experience all of life’s pleasures and pains.

Every college student dreads graduation: After four years of security, what comes next? The “real” world? For Catalina, in her senior year, this dread is emphasized by an actual existential threat. Her status as a student helps to keep her from being deported, and if she can’t find a sustainable life path to follow after college, she risks being taken from the only world she’s ever known. When a pretty, privileged boy starts to take interest in her, it seems like a way is opening to get everything she wants. Nathaniel—whom Catalina never refers to as “Nathan” or “Nate,” underscoring the disparity of their social statuses—is the son of a famous director and an aspiring anthropologist. Both he and his father have a keen interest in the culture of Latin America, particularly Ecuador, where Catalina and her family have roots. Catalina flirts with Nathaniel, ensuring that he slowly, helplessly falls for her, and she starts to catch feelings too. But when the threat of deportation becomes a reality for her family, Catalina has to take advantage of her budding romance, asking Nathaniel’s father to help her gain public support by collaborating on a documentary. The project puts a strain on Catalina as she is forced to define herself, to speak for her dysfunctional family and to confront what kind of person Harvard has made her.

Written in brilliant, overflowing prose, Catalina is one of the best, most fun-to-read books you will find. You may see a bit of yourself in Catalina, or you may learn how to empathize with someone whose entire life is chaos.

Read our interview with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio about Catalina.

In Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s brilliant and fun debut novel, Catalina Ituralde, an adventurous free spirit and an undocumented student at Harvard, finds college to be a more dystopian experience than the typical American envisioning.

Crime Fiction, Debut Fiction, Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller Debut Fiction Crime Fiction

Between This World and the Next

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Joseph Nightingale, nicknamed Fearless after a moment of heroism during the Bosnian conflict, is a British war photographer who was in Nairobi during the August 1998 attack on the U.S. Embassy. While he was away, his pregnant girlfriend, an award-winning investigative journalist, was killed in an automobile accident. As Praveen Herat’s gripping debut political thriller, Between This World and the Next, opens, Fearless has accepted his old friend, Alyosha Federenko’s invitation to Cambodia, arriving overwhelmed by grief and guilt.

Federenko stashes Fearless at the Naga, a gathering place for the gangs and soldiers of fortune set loose upon the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the chilling pleasures of this book is Herat’s vivid, knowledgeable portrait of this threatening netherworld, from outposts like the Naga to breakaway states like Transnistria, where money is exchanged for advanced weaponry and private armies are assembled to rule in feudal power.

Federenko himself resides at a luxury hotel while he wheels and deals in an attempt to gather money and power to work himself back into the upper echelons of the new Russian elite. Fearless at first forgives the acquisitiveness of a man he knows was born in chaos and poverty. But as events unfold, and people get hurt and killed, Fearless’s worldview of engaged empathy collides with Federenko’s selfish, transactional view of human interactions.

Also at the Naga is Song, a young Cambodian woman enslaved as a cleaner. As children, she and her twin sister were sold into prostitution. Song’s face has since been ravaged by an acid attack, and her soul is deflated by loss of contact with her sister. She cares for the young children who are brought to the Naga by adult predators and whose gruesome abuse is recorded on video. The existence of one of these videos, handed off to Fearless, sets the elaborate plot rolling with increasing velocity.

The final chapters of Between This World and the Next are breathtaking in their descriptive power and imaginative reach, and the novel’s ending is very satisfying. But some threads still dangle and not all questions are answered—which makes one hope for a sequel.

Praveen Herat’s prizewinning debut thriller, Between This World and the Next, paints a vivid, knowledgeable portrait of a threatening political netherworld, including breakaway states like Transnistria.