If you’re a fan of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love or Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, you’ll likely feel right at home within the perpetually shifting landscape of Claire Oshetsky’s debut novel, Chouette. Which is to say, if you don’t mind a little unexpected violence set in a surreal landscape, it will be right up your alley.
Chouette’s mom, Tiny, is a cellist who has a dream of a sexual encounter with an owl and, two weeks later, learns she is pregnant. “You may wonder: How could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl? I, too, am astounded, because my owl-lover was a woman.” Tiny’s unnamed husband is at first more overjoyed by the pregnancy than she is, and as the owl-baby begins to take over Tiny’s thoughts and emotions, her musical talent begins to desert her.
After the birth, Tiny’s husband rejects the notion of an owl-baby, suggesting that the child he calls “Charlotte” is perhaps developmentally disabled while overlooking the fact that she eats mice and other snacks not typically found in the grocery store’s baby food department. As the days begin to drift away like so many molted feathers, some hazy shapes of proto-truths emerge. Tiny’s husband wants to “fix” Chouette, while Tiny would rather see nature take its course and adapt her love to her owl-child’s needs, rather than the other way around.
Tiny’s husband enrolls Chouette in an increasingly bizarre series of treatments carried out by medical practitioners with names like Doctor Zoloft, Doctor Benzodiazepine, Doctor Chelation, Doctor Rectal Flushing and Doctor Hyperbaric. Needless to say, these therapies to “normalize” Chouette are unsuccessful, but that doesn’t keep the husband from trying, nor Tiny from getting more frantic in her quest to allow Chouette simply to be herself. It seems inevitable that a day of reckoning is not long off, and when it comes, it arrives like an owl strike: abruptly, decisively and violently. Owls, after all, are predators.
Oshetsky shows an exceptional talent for keeping the reader off balance. Is Tiny hallucinating? Is she in hell? Is this a metaphor? Is any of the story actually happening in the manner it’s being told? The ambiguity is tantalizing, even mesmerizing, and if your internal gyroscope is sufficiently operative to keep you from slipping off the edge, Chouette will richly reward your attention.
It seems inevitable that a day of reckoning is not long off in Claire Oshetsky’s novel, and when it comes, it arrives like an owl strike: abruptly, decisively and violently.
Like her hit 2020 debut, Migrations, Charlotte McConaghy’s second novel spirals into the recesses of the heart, exploring climate change and human behavior through the story of one woman’s fraught life.
In Once There Were Wolves (8.5 hours), Inti keeps more company with animals than with people. Her work involves releasing wolves into the Scottish Highlands, a controversial venture that arouses suspicion—and then violence—from farmers. The wolves’ presence will allow forests to regrow by forcing deer to keep moving, but the local villagers can’t see beyond the threat to their lives and livestock. Having grown up between a hardline, back-to-the-land father and a mother whose professional expertise is in domestic abuse, Inti’s nurtured cynicism competes with the kindness and goodness she experiences from her sister and a handful of other close relationships.
In the audiobook, master voice actor Saskia Maarleveld keeps the book’s intrigue high. Her breathless delivery captures Inti’s sensitivity and other characters’ misgivings of one another, heightening the tension between domesticity and wildness. Maarleveld also drives home the book’s global expanse through a medley of expert accents, including Canadian, Australian and Scottish.
I can think of a thousand things that inspired me to write New York, My Village. I can tell stories of how my first impressions of the Bronx, New York, during my first visit to America in August 1993 have continued to fertilize my imagination. I can tell you of how my life as a former Catholic seminarian/priest got me to see racism from the unique angle of the Holy of Holies. I can tell you how shocked I was to discover the whiteness and racism of the big American publishing houses as I auctioned my first book, the story collection Say You’re One of Them (Little, Brown, 2008). I can tell you how New York City bedbugs ate up my peace in 2013 and of my fears that I would spread the bugs to the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, where I was a fellow. I can tell you how a group of African American professionals from Atlanta, Georgia—which the author Anthony Grooms brought together in 2014—encouraged me to set my writing in America so I could write about racism.
But suffice it to share with you how the first two chapters of New York, My Village were inspired by an American visa interview in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2004.
I was living in Nigeria when I landed an admission to the Helen Zell Writers’ Program of the University of Michigan. It meant the world to me. I’d always loved Midwestern America, having studied in Omaha, Nebraska, in the mid-1990s. Though the U.S. visa process in Nigeria had always felt like being dragged to court, I didn’t foresee any major difficulties, since this was going to be my fourth visa.
I showed up early in the morning at the embassy. Because of the crowds of visa applicants, I finally got interviewed around 3 p.m. The fact that I was nursing a cold didn’t help matters. Because of the embassy’s powerful air conditioning, I was sniffling and clearing my throat the whole time. But I’d say I was coping well with the extremely tense atmosphere.
The American consular officers can ask you anything. ANYTHING. They can even insult your accent or mock your country if they feel like it. I’ve attempted to capture the terror that is a Western embassy visa process in the developing world in the opening pages of New York, My Village. But that day in the American embassy, decked out in my Roman collar, nothing could have shocked me more than when my interviewer asked me to write him a short story to prove I was a writer.
Thinking this write-me-a-story thing was a joke, I shrugged and giggled and told him the University of Michigan and other programs had already ascertained I was a writer, hence the admission and scholarship offers. He pretended he didn’t hear me and chattily asked why I wanted to be a fiction writer and not a poet. “Maybe someday I’ll also write poetry, sir,” I said as I stood there before his booth. In the silence that followed his nod, I was confident I’d secured the visa. But looking beyond my jubilant face, he slid me a pen and paper, insisting I write a story. When I looked lost, he started typing into his computer.
My fingers began to tremble with shock, then anger. I wanted so much to spit in the face of this consular officer. I kept clearing my throat, though I wanted to blow my nose and pour mucus all over him, his computer and the booth. Yet I wore a pleasant face, because as they say, it’s only when the mosquito lands on your balls that you realize there are ways to solve a problem without violence.
Nobody had ever abused my writing talent like this interviewer! If I remember correctly, this man wasn’t even angry at me. He seemed pleased that he could get fresh writing out of me at visa point—as in gun point. I’d never drafted a short story in a week, much less in a few minutes. My quickest draft took two sleepless weeks and resulted in the shortest story in my collection, “What Language Is That?” And apart from the fact that my fingers were too sweaty to hold the pen, I couldn’t remember the last time I wrote longhand. To be asked to do this, at what seemed like the biggest test of my talent, felt totally cruel.
“Sir, could I sit down to write the story?” I remember murmuring.
“Mr. Akpan, that won’t be necessary,” he said, smiling like he was saving me from being lazy. “Just a short story. Nothing long.”
I tried to write on the booth counter. It would also be the first time I wrote a story while standing up. And I prefer to write at night.
“My stories feel like an unresolvable crisis within me, something I can’t escape from, something I must carefully and sensitively incubate forever.”
Even in the best of situations, my stories do everything to sabotage me. They do everything not to submit to my dreams. I wake up some days without enough faith even to love the “lovely” passages I’ve written. It’s always a fight, a long, drawn-out war whose battles I win one at a time, mainly because I run away to fight another day or week or year.
My stories feel like an unresolvable crisis within me, something I can’t escape from, something I must carefully and sensitively incubate forever, or till I miraculously discover how to show the invisible connections and bonds and spirit between the disparate characters and parts. I must rewrite countless times “to get in the reader’s face,” as Stephen King puts it. I live in admiration of those who publish a book every other year. But during that interview, I doubt even the most productive of authors could’ve written anything.
“Sir, it takes me a loooong time to write a story,” I said.
“No, this shouldn’t take long,” my interviewer said.
“I could show you the samples that got me into Michigan from my laptop.”
“Come on, you can do it!”
He was distracted by a colleague who entered his booth to ask a question. But the impatience in my interviewer’s voice had warned me that, as our people say, he had both the yam and the knife. I was a beggar.
Even my eyes refused to focus on the paper he’d given me. Instead, they focused on my shoes, which seemed very far away or as though they belonged to someone else. I felt stupid, as if this man were trying to prove that I’d scammed my way to Michigan. I was afraid he saw me as a criminal he must stop from reaching the shores of his country. I began to understand those who think that the sole purpose of immigration departments is to keep people out of their countries.
Still my mind was blank. Nope, it wasn’t blank—it was scalded by anger and humiliation and shame. My mind started bubbling with cusses instead of sentences for the opening of a story. I wanted to tell him to go “hug a transformer,” as we say in Nigeria, meaning to go and electrocute yourself with the highest voltage possible. I wanted to cuss the whole embassy: “Efiig ijire nyine . . . may hernia swell your testicles!” (One of my Black characters in New York, My Village says this when white church ushers want to flush him from a New Jersey church.)
The consular officer couldn’t even let me think up a short story in peace; he kept looking at his watch and telling me to hurry up, reminding me he still had many people to interview. He’d become more impatient, more restless. His powers over me meant he also had the luxury to show how he really felt. He tried to make me feel as though I was the one holding up his important job, locking up hundreds of people all day in this embassy. And what options did I have but to stand there and let him torture me? This sense of powerlessness was the height of my violation. Even my cold felt strange, as though the mucus in my nostril was slowly turning into sand and blocking my breathing.
Even when I tried to sublimate my horrible mental state with prayers, they still came out raw. “Oh, the Lord of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” I prayed silently, “please, don’t let this f**king asshole of an American destroy my American dream! Oh, Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints and angels, move and intercede for the grace for me to be calm to write this stupid story. Don’t wait till my situation becomes hopeless, just so that you can dispatch Saint Jude, patron of hopeless causes, that perpetual latecomer!”
– – – – –
But heaven knew I needed this visa more than anything. I had always believed that America would develop my writing. And that afternoon, it calmed me to remember that this America terrorizing me now was the same America doling out MFA scholarships to our army of new Nigerian talents.
Prudence meant I quietly ate the shit of this short story-writing humiliation. After all, I’d already done the hard part, getting admission into Michigan. I’d lived through five anxious months as the MFA program read earlier versions of “An Ex-Mas Feast” and “My Parents’ Bedroom” (both of which made 2005 and 2006 editions of The New Yorker). Now to buoy my spirit, I tried to remember the sweet, welcoming emails from my would-be Michigan writing professors: Eileen Pollack, Nick Delbanco and Peter Ho Davies. They said they loved my writing and would help me become a better writer. They said they loved my imagery and voice—even if I chose another program.
After about 15 minutes of wracking my brain, I managed to come up with two stupid sentences: I could never have known **** was a thief until that night. You would never have believed he could have treated me like this. I didn’t want to show this to him. I believed I’d flunked the interview since I couldn’t write beyond these two lines. But I was tired of him harrying me and worried about the people still waiting to be interviewed, so I held my breath and slid the paper back to him.
“So, Mr. Akpan, what happened next?” he asked excitedly after reading it aloud.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“No, I really want to know what he did.”
“I have no idea, sir.”
“But you can just tell me what he did. Just summarize. It’s really gripping.”
“I would have to create the whole story from scratch and then summarize.”
Disappointed, he shrugged and asked how I was going to pay for my MFA since I’d rejected Michigan’s scholarship offer. I said my church would. But since I’d forgotten to bring the church’s financial statement, he became very quiet and still, his face hardened like he was going to finally nail me. I just kept saying I’d bring it the following day, knowing that providing this paperwork would be less difficult than writing the two-liner. I babbled and begged till he took my passport and said to come for the visa in two days’ time. I thanked him and loosened my collar and sauntered out, whistling a song of gratitude to the Virgin Mary.
An unusual request during a visa interview left Uwem Akpan, author of the bestselling story collection Say You’re One of Them, scrambling to find his voice. It also helped to spark his first novel, New York, My Village.
The country of Turkey and its capital city, Istanbul, stand at the intersection of many rival influences: Asia and Europe; democracy and authoritarianism; Turks, Kurds and Armenians. In her debut novel, The Four Humors, Mina Seçkin throws her arms around these diverse elements and hugs them close through the story of Sibel, a 20-year-old Turkish American premedical student.
Sibel departed Brooklyn for Istanbul to study for her medical school entrance exam and to take care of her grandmother, who has Parkinson’s disease. She’s also—whether she admits it or not—fleeing the site of her father’s untimely fatal heart attack. And since maladies love company, she finds herself with a chronic headache, which she ascribes to her “humors,” referring to an ancient philosophy of medicine that suggests that health is the consequence of the balance of four components: blood, bile, choler and phlegm.
Like many archaic metaphors, the humor theory may be somewhat deficient in the specific but valuable in the general. Sibel finds evidence of the humors not only in her own body but also in her surroundings, noting that “Istanbul is a humor. The lubricant, oily and thick, black humor that begins to leak from my spleen. Istanbul is black bile, melancholy, only disguised as a city.” Sibel also employs the concept as she peels back the layers of her family history, revealing three generations’ worth of political and cultural friction. Each of the novel’s four sections invokes one of the humors, distributed across space and time, all arcing back to Sibel’s present-day state of affairs.
If all that weren’t enough to occupy the head and heart of a woman caught between cultures, Sibel is also navigating her relationship with her American boyfriend, Cooper, who has joined her for the summer. Sibel’s family’s increasing acceptance of Cooper is mirrored in inverse proportion by her growing ambivalence toward him.
Like the Russian soap operas that Sibel and her grandmother watch devotedly, The Four Humors unfolds at a leisurely pace, with an extensive cast of characters and a multigenerational plot that demands your attention. Once you fall into its rhythm, you’ll find yourself hooked.
Like the Russian soap operas beloved by its protagonist, The Four Humors has a leisurely rhythm, but once you fall in, you’ll be hooked.
Taking on questions of race, sexual identity or class in a work of barely 200 pages would be an ambitious project for any writer. Asali Solomon’s second novel, The Days of Afrekete, tackles all three with insight, wit and grace—a tribute to her considerable talent.
At the core of the novel, whose title refers to a character in Audre Lorde’s Zami, is the story of Liselle Belmont and Selena Octave, two Black women who meet at Bryn Mawr College in the 1990s and enter into a brief, intense relationship; each ascribes the fault for its end to the other. Even at a distance of some 20 years, it’s clear that neither woman has been able to shed the memory of their four months as lovers, scenes of which Solomon sketches in vivid, economical flashbacks.
As their college years recede, Liselle’s and Selena’s lives proceed in opposite directions. Selena undergoes a series of psychiatric hospitalizations and moves through a succession of downwardly mobile jobs. Liselle, in contrast, marries Winn Anderson, a white lawyer from a wealthy Connecticut family whose primary campaign against an incumbent Black state representative has ended in defeat, a disappointment compounded by Winn’s entanglement with an unscrupulous real estate developer that has made him the subject of an FBI investigation.
Most of the novel’s present-day action unfolds at a dinner party hosted by Liselle and Winn at their 150-year-old home in an upscale neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia. The racially mixed gathering, intended to thank Winn’s core supporters, subtly dissects Liselle’s profound unease over the state of her marriage alongside her almost comical discomfort in the presence of Xochitl, the highly educated daughter of Liselle’s Latina cleaning woman.
Solomon doesn’t offer a tidy resolution to the story, but her novel doesn’t demand one. The Days of Afrekete’s strength lies in its well-drawn characters and its realistic portrait of how old desires sometimes refuse to remain buried.
With insight, wit and grace, Asali Solomon’s second novel offers a realistic portrait of how old desires sometimes refuse to remain buried.
Literature and myth are full of tales of the naif who finds himself embroiled in circumstances so off-the-wall that only his innocence and good nature save him. Uwem Akpan’s first novel, New York, My Village, is almost one of these tales.
Nigerian editor Ekong Udousoro has been granted a Toni Morrison fellowship to work on a book about the Biafran War at a boutique New York publishing house. But first, he has to get to the United States, and the novel’s opening chapters deal with the frustrations of acquiring a visa. Ekong experiences a foretaste of what he’ll find in New York City: people who are indifferent and reject him, and people who seem kind and still reject him. No one bothers to tell him why his visa application is rejected, even though he has all the reams of necessary paperwork. They reject him—and others, including a woman who becomes so distraught that her clothes fall off of her—because they have the power and they can. Finally, on his third try, Ekong gets his visa.
New York City is just as baffling. Ekong’s colleagues at the publishing house, every one of them white, welcome him effusively. They’re happy to treat him like a king as long as he keeps a low profile. When Ekong, his childhood friend Usen and Usen’s family go to church, they’re nearly thrown out, then embraced, then ushered into the sacristy where the priest tells them never to come back and suggests they worship at an African American church nearby. This nearly sparks an international incident. Worst of all, Ekong and his screwy neighbors in their Hell’s Kitchen walk-up have bedbugs.
But Ekong is no Candide, nor is he Xi from The Gods Must Be Crazy. Intelligent and sophisticated, he’s capable of a rage that would never occur to these characters. Even as he comes from a place roiling with strife, corruption and intertribal bigotry—his very name means “war”—he just can’t wrap his mind around the perfidy, hypocrisy and smarmy racism that he’s found in America.
Akpan, author of the award-winning story collection Say You’re One of Them, allows Ekong’s astonished anger, acerbic humor and, despite everything, love of New York and its people to anchor him. Of all the characters in New York, My Village, Ekong knows who he is. We are privileged to get to know him, too.
In the town of Tamil Nadu, India, Kalki isn’t the 10th human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, but few people know that. After all, his skin is blue, just like Vishnu, and his family has built an entire ashram around him. People come from all over to be healed, and Kalki often succeeds.
Growing up in the role of a god comes with unique responsibilities. Kalki isn’t supposed to play with the other kids in his village, and his cousin Lakshman is his only friend. When a very sick little girl comes to the ashram, Kalki heals her, but he also notices his father giving her a white tablet to swallow. Then Kalki is asked to conjure horses, and again he succeeds—but also notices unfamiliar tire indentations leading up to the ashram. The most troublesome piece of evidence against his divinity is that there are some people Kalki can’t heal.
The fabric around the ruse begins to disintegrate, but it takes a long time. Kalki lives an incredibly sheltered existence. Occasional travelers who visit the ashram provide his only link to the outside world, and these interactions are years apart. His father is controlling and leaves very little room for new ideas.
When Kalki is 22, he leaves Tamil Nadu for a world tour with his father. In New York, he reconnects with Lakshman and goes on a real-world adventure, during which he begins to understand the scope of what people will choose to believe. He plunges into the city’s underground rock music scene, which is as different as possible from life in the ashram. Kalki also learns his own backstory, an origin tale that is so fantastical and yet so plausible that it deserves a moment of appreciation.
As Kalki is forced to reckon with the lies that form the foundation of his life, SJ Sindu’s second novel, Blue-Skinned Gods, pursues questions of sexuality, social hierarchy, family secrets, toxic masculinity and religious abuse. Sindu doesn’t quite nail the emotional payoff at the novel’s close, but she still delivers an exciting journey that lovingly explores the nature of chosen families.
Kalki isn’t actually the 10th human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, but few people know that.
Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Erdrich understands the sense of significance, whether subliminal or overt, that we can glean from stories—and what this offers our daily lives. The Sentence, Erdrich’s latest novel, unfolds over the course of one tumultuous year, and its persistent search for meaning reveals astonishing, sublime depths.
Tookie is an ex-convict turned bookseller working in a Minneapolis bookstore after years of reading for pure survival. Her voracious appetite for words has made her very good at what she does, but on All Souls’ Day in 2019, her world is thrown into disarray by an unlikely challenger. A customer who recently died has made her way back to the store, bringing along some revelations in a mysterious handwritten book, and she won’t leave until Tookie can figure out why she returned in the first place.
Though this often comically unpredictable ghost story forms the spine of The Sentence, Erdrich also branches out to explore the broader landscape of Minneapolis in 2019 and 2020, from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed. Yet her narrative never loses its grip. As vast as its scope may be, The Sentence doesn’t feel overstuffed because Erdrich roots it in Tookie’s own longings, beliefs and challenges.
Tookie isn’t just plagued by a literal ghost; she’s also haunted in other ways, and as she searches for the significance of these hauntings, she finds that she’s far from alone in her experience. Erdrich’s prose, layered with unforgettable flourishes of detail—from the mesmeric spinning of a ceiling fan to the quest for the perfect soup—enhances and deepens this growing sense of a larger, collective haunting.
The Sentence is an imaginative, boldly honest exploration of our ever-evolving search for truth in the stories we both consume and create. It’s a staggering addition to Erdrich’s already impressive body of work.
Unfolding over the course of one tumultuous year, Louise Erdrich’s novel searches for meaning and reveals astonishing, sublime depths.
Readers first fell in love with Lucy Barton in Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, a gentle reflection on the titular character’s life and parental influence during an extended hospitalization. In Oh William!, it’s been years since Lucy left her first husband, William. But despite the many affairs he conducted during their marriage and her own affair that prompted her departure, they remain each other’s confidants.
As the novel opens, Lucy has been widowed for a year after the death of her second husband, David. She explores her grief throughout the book, but her devotion to William also demands her attention. As in each of Strout’s novels about Lucy, her narration is nearly a stream of consciousness. The novel’s lack of chapter breaks reinforces its interior nature and invites readers to immerse themselves in Lucy’s ruminations.
As Lucy contemplates her lasting bond with William, she considers their marriage and the ways their relationship has affected their daughters. She also takes the reader through the pair’s misadventures in their later years. It isn’t always clear whether Lucy likes or respects her ex-husband, but her tie to him is unbreakable, her curiosity about him unwavering: “I wondered who William was. I have wondered this before. Many times I have wondered this.”
Likewise, William turns to Lucy, rather than to his current wife, when his sleep is disrupted by night terrors involving his late mother. And it’s Lucy he seeks when he confronts a secret his mother kept from him.
Pulitzer Prize winner Strout is a master of quiet, reflective stories that are driven more by their characters than by events. Her fans will find plenty to love as Lucy and William set out to explore his family history. At each step, Lucy contemplates her relationships to the people around her. Though she often feels invisible, her ties to William, their daughters and the strangers they encounter remind her that she has a place in the world.
Strout is a master of reflective stories that are driven more by characters than by events. Her fans will find plenty more to love about Lucy and William.
Jung Yun’s second novel is a riveting story of a Korean American woman claiming a country that has done its best to reject her.
After decades as a model, Elinor Hanson went back to school and reinvented herself as a journalist. Barely supporting herself with freelance work, she is surprised when one of her graduate school professors offers her a plum assignment: covering North Dakota’s oil boom for a prominent magazine. Elinor, who grew up on a U.S. Air Force base in North Dakota, is curious about the changes this new gold rush has created, so she agrees to travel home.
Elinor barely recognizes the state she left behind. Its small towns burst with new arrivals seeking opportunities, and fracking has all but destroyed the land. But the anxiety expressed by longtime residents is dishearteningly familiar to Elinor, and her encounters with sexism and racism quickly bring back the trauma of life on the air base. Elinor is the daughter of an American airman and a Korean woman who met overseas, and on the base, other wives withheld their friendship from Elinor’s mother, while other husbands were all too willing to flirt.
As Elinor grapples with the difficult assignment, she is drawn into an unsolved missing persons case: a white woman who disappeared while jogging eight years ago. But that story doesn’t allow her to forge fresh investigative paths or distract from the rage she realizes has been simmering since her teens. In fact, the longer Elinor stays in North Dakota, the angrier she becomes, and a meeting with her sister only exacerbates the flood of bad memories. When some of her former classmates reach out about a harassment suit against her professor, she begins to question his motivations in passing on the assignment in the first place.
O Beautiful moves swiftly, with all the force of a finely honed thriller. As Elinor reckons with her past and the ways people have treated her, her mother and her sisters, she begins to examine the anger and love she feels for both her family and country. Open-ended and openhearted, O Beautiful may provide Elinor with more questions than answers, but it also instills in her a newfound determination to claim America as her own
Open-ended and open-hearted, O Beautiful instills a newfound determination in its Korean American heroine to claim America as her own.
Imagine a fig tree speaking, the unexpected perspective its voice would lend to a war-torn island’s history, full of forbidden teenage love, reunions and cultural divides. Such is Elif Shafak’s intergenerational novel of love, loss and family, The Island of Missing Trees.
The novel moves between 1974 Cyprus—as cities collapse amid war, as neighbors are made enemies depending on whether they are Greek or Turkish, Christian or Muslim—and London in the 2010s. Ada Kazantzakis, teenage daughter of Kostas and his wife, Defne, is fascinated and bothered by the fig tree that her botanist father spends so much time and energy tending. While Ada wonders at her father’s obsession, the tree tells her own story, offering the keys to discover how this family came to England, far from the island that Ada only knows in stories, the place that Kostas still calls home.
The novel shifts easily in time and space, but even more interesting is the way that it functions as a story of environment and species. The fig tree notices birds and bats, other trees and ants; she sees and comments upon politics, war, love and the broad impact of human choices. She sees into the hearts of humans, animals and the earth, and tries to convey the beauty and challenges of doing so.
Shafak’s novel, particularly in the meditative moments when the fig tree speaks, asks readers to see beyond themselves, to consider cultures and conflicts that are not their own, to see how each action ripples.
Elif Shafak’s novel asks readers to see beyond themselves, particularly in the meditative moments when a fig tree speaks.
The 1991 murder of four teenage girls that inspired my novel, See How Small, has haunted me for 23 years. It struck a deep chord in anyone who lived in Austin, Texas, then—one that reverberates even now.
I was teaching high school in Austin at the time, and my eldest daughter had been born only a few months earlier, so the sudden loss of these girls—Sarah and Jennifer Harbison, Amy Ayers and Eliza Thomas—hit particularly close to home. They were in a very real sense, the “every girls” of the community: They were loved by their parents, belonged to Future Farmers of America, danced the two-step, dated awkward boys, attended midnight movies, had sleepovers and looked out for one another.
Then one evening the unimaginable happened: They were bound, raped, shot and then burned in a fire set to cover up the crime.
Eight years went by as the investigation was plagued by false confessions and false leads. Then, in 1999, a newly launched investigation engulfed four young men who were boys at the time of the murders, roughly the same ages as the girls. After hours of interrogation, two of the men confessed. They soon recanted, but were later convicted and sent to prison for a decade based solely on the confessions.
Still, the parents of the girls must have thought—after enduring the horrific details of the trial—that finally there was a resolution, there was justice, even if at a great price to them personally. Now they could try to move on with their lives.
And then in the summer of 2009, shortly after I began See How Small, both men were released because forensics investigators—using more advanced DNA identification methods—found DNA evidence of two previously unknown male assailants. In short, the two men who confessed couldn’t have been the perpetrators.
So what did this all mean? Investigators and the prosecution had told the same story to the girls’ parents for a decade. The parents reacted as anyone would who’d shaped the arc of their lives around it: They refused to believe the new evidence. The original story of a robbery gone wrong—compelling in its detail if somewhat implausible—had become the parents’ reality, a way for them to make meaning out of atrocity.
See How Small is my attempt to make emotional sense out of inexplicable events by channeling all the voices we’ll never hear.
And what of the girls? Weren’t they more than victims? What about their stories? And what of the incarcerated men (whose boyhoods were now long past) and their families? It had dramatically shaped their lives as well. The murders—known since as the “yogurt shop murders” because of where they took place—remain unsolved. The case is a Texas In Cold Blood of sorts, a challenge to our basic ideas of justice, responsibility, grief, love and even the shape of the stories we tell to make sense of it. The ache in this story stays with you. See How Small is my attempt to make emotional sense out of inexplicable events by channeling all the voices we’ll never hear.
Another inspiration for See How Small was very personal. One day, soon after I began writing the novel, my wife called me at my downtown Chicago office, saying our then 6-year-old daughter had gone missing from school. The police were called, the school grounds searched, the neighborhood canvassed, a helicopter hovered overhead.
While racing home in a cab, I called everyone I knew. Horrific images rose in my mind. Nearby Lake Michigan took on new connotations. Alleyways seemed ominous. Every passerby suspect. How could we have been so oblivious to the dangers?
Eventually, nearly an hour after the first call, my wife called to tell me they’d found her. She’d created a play date with a friend, somehow evaded the school staff and walked three quarters of a mile to a friend’s house. She was safe. But the veil had been lifted, everyday life revealed to be potentially treacherous and wondrous at the same time.
The title See How Small is taken from the voice of the dead girls in the novel, who say, “See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?” This is the central theme of the book: Though its characters are separated by suffering and loss, by the ephemeral, random nature of the world, they can make an eternal human shape out of it, can tell their own stories—full of joys and sufferings—that connect them with each another, and with each of us.
In the end, it’s about transcending loss through accepting loss— embracing all of human experience, and being transfigured by it.
A longtime resident of Austin, Texas, author Scott Blackwood now lives in Chicago and teaches writing at Southern Illinois University. He has won awards for his previous work, which includes the novel We Agreed to Meet Just Here and a two-volume history of Paramount Records.
This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
The 1991 murder of four teenage girls that inspired my novel, See How Small, has haunted me for 23 years. It struck a deep chord in anyone who lived in Austin, Texas, then—one that reverberates even now.
As a novelist, I’ve come to realize that the stories I feel compelled to write, the ones that tug at me hardest, have resonated from my childhood. Childhood experience echoes through adult life. The experiences, ideas, themes from my formative years resonate into my adult consciousness and I try to make sense of them through fiction. You see, you don’t choose the story, it chooses you.
When I was about 3 years old, my father would read to me from a book he had about the Apollo missions. It was called Moon Flight Atlas, and it was by Patrick Moore. It was published in 1970 and only went up to the Apollo 13 mission. That mission, dramatized in the Tom Hanks/Ron Howard film of the same name, was the focus of this book. I don’t know why my father read this book to me—it wasn’t exactly Goodnight Moon—but he did. He told the story of the oxygen tank exploding on the way to the moon, and explained how little air they had remaining, and what that meant, and about how they had to slingshot round the dark side of the moon to get home, about how there was only a 10 percent chance of them making it back to Earth.
I was utterly captivated, but it wasn’t space per se that fascinated me so—it wasn’t the rockets and spaceships and stars—it was the men. Those men! Lovell, Swigert, Haise! Laconic, focused and utterly cool under pressure. I remember poring over diagrams and little illustrations of Jim Lovell crawling from the Command Module into the Lunar Module (which was used as a lifeboat of sorts) in grave danger, hundreds of thousands of miles from home, staying calm, working the problem. I was a sensitive child, prone to anxiety, and it hooked my young imagination.
In my mid-20s, I developed a severe and debilitating anxiety disorder, with obsessive and intrusive thoughts. It was a hellish few years. I couldn’t even write a shopping list (really: I tried). I could barely function as a human being. But as I started to get better, with help and support and therapy, I started to write again. And I found myself, perhaps unsurprisingly, returning to those men, those childhood heroes of mine—men who could control their emotions (unlike me!), so calm and collected under pressure (unlike me!) and pushing them into fiction—a story which became The Last Pilot.
From the blackest period of my life, I sailed around the dark side of the moon, and I, too, returned home.
British author Benjamin Johncock's debut novel, The Last Pilot, blends fact and fiction in the story of an Air Force test pilot who suffers a devastating loss and throws himself into NASA's fledgling space program at the expense of his marriage. Johncock lives with his family in Norwich, England.
A British author shares the story behind his lifelong fascination with the American space program, the subject of his emotionally resonant debut novel.
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I was utterly captivated, but it wasn’t space per se that fascinated me so—it wasn’t the rockets and spaceships and stars—it was the men. Those men! Lovell, Swigert, Haise! Laconic, focused and utterly cool under pressure. I remember poring over diagrams and little illustrations of Jim Lovell crawling from the Command Module into the Lunar Module (which was used as a lifeboat of sorts) in grave danger, hundreds of thousands of miles from home, staying calm, working the problem. I was a sensitive child, prone to anxiety, and it hooked my young imagination.
