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Not long ago, it would have been fantasy that Ireland would have a gay prime minister, but the majority-Catholic country welcomed its first in 2017. The country has evolved from an often hateful hierocracy to a seat of social liberalism. Of this evolution, John Boyne’s new novel is an essential witness.

In 1945, the priesthood tears the novel’s narrator, Cyril, as an infant from his mother. A banker and his literary wife, Maude Avery, adopt him. Cyril discovers that he has no interest in girls, instead nursing a crush on his best mate, Julian. Homosexuality in Ireland being both sinful and criminal, Cyril must stay mum. But he confesses his many backroom trysts to a priest, who croaks as a result.

Like many gay men, Cyril marries out of convention, but not before professing his love to Julian. This goes over like a lead balloon, so Cyril finds himself in Amsterdam in Conradian exile. Dutch mores are more amenable; Cyril meets the love of his life. But even Holland has its hostilities. So the pair ends up in New York City at the height of the AIDS crisis. There Cyril becomes a volunteer in an AIDS clinic, and he and his partner adopt a son after a fashion. Normalcy is within reach before a homophobe assaults the pair in Central Park.

These are Furies on the visible spectrum. They pursue Cyril back to Ireland, where signs of a thaw are already evident. (Cyril is even propositioned by a bisexual pol aspiring to become prime minister.) Cyril reconciles with the ghosts of his past, including his estranged wife and biological mother.

More than a coming-of-age story, The Heart’s Invisible Furies is one man’s journey from persecution to toleration. Punctuated with simple dialogue, its nearly 600 pages betray Maude’s dictum that “brevity is the key.” But the novel seldom lags and often delights.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Not long ago, it would have been fantasy that Ireland would have a gay prime minister, but the majority-Catholic country welcomed its first in 2017. The country has evolved from an often hateful hierocracy to a seat of social liberalism. Of this evolution, John Boyne’s new novel is an essential witness.

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“Children are not on the table,” Joan Ashby tells her future husband, Martin. “I possess no need, primal or otherwise, for motherhood.” This is no surprise, given Joan’s white-hot career as a writer of short stories—and her own lonely childhood with two loveless parents. Yet, when she finds herself pregnant shortly after she and Martin marry, she sets aside her fame to raise one, then two boys in the suburban Virginia town of Rhome.

While Martin’s soaring surgical career takes him around the world, the famous Joan Ashby becomes Joan Manning, a housewife who takes yoga classes and shuttles her boys to school and swim lessons. She tells no one when, during the days while the boys are at school, she comes back to her writing. To her, the act of writing is “exquisitely important, so much like prayer.” Over nearly a decade, she writes a remarkable novel that she feels sure will signal her return as a force in the literary world.

But the time never seems right to publish. Younger son Eric blossoms into a gifted computer programmer who makes his first million (and many more) while still a teenager. Joan finds herself a stranger in her own home when a gaggle of coders move in seemingly overnight, much to Martin’s delight.

In a family of extraordinarily accomplished people, Joan’s other son, Daniel, struggles to find his identity. After showing early promise as a writer, a well-meaning teacher mentions Daniel’s mother’s fame. Daunted, he sets aside his stories and embarks on an ill-suited career in venture capital.

After a breathtaking betrayal threatens to fracture the family, Joan retreats to India and reclaims a room of her own.

It’s almost impossible to believe that The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is the first novel by Cherise Wolas, a lawyer and film producer. Gorgeously written and completely captivating, the book spans decades and continents, deftly capturing the tug so many women feel between motherhood and self-identity.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Children are not on the table,” Joan Ashby tells her future husband, Martin. “I possess no need, primal or otherwise, for motherhood.” This is no surprise, given Joan’s white-hot career as a writer of short stories—and her own lonely childhood with two loveless parents. Yet, when she finds herself pregnant shortly after she and Martin marry, she sets aside her fame to raise one, then two boys in the suburban Virginia town of Rhome.

Julia Robinson and Cassie Burnes are best friends, enjoying a carefree life on the cusp of adolescence in Royston, a sleepy town in the North Shore of Massachusetts. The unsettling changes that upend their placid existence are the subject of The Burning Girl, veteran novelist Claire Messud’s penetrating psychological thriller about “what it means to be a girl growing up.”

Julia and Cassie spend the summer before seventh grade exploring the environs of Royston, in excursions that take them to a posh country estate turned long-abandoned women’s mental asylum, among other places. But that idyllic summer—one that’s marred only by a dog bite Cassie sustains at the animal shelter where the girls volunteer—marks a turning point in a relationship in which they’ve been “conjoined all their lives,” as Julia, the novel’s narrator, describes it.

As middle school begins, Cassie falls in with a group of girls led by one whom Julia bitterly nicknames the Evil Morsel. Cassie’s life takes an even darker turn after Anders Shute, the emergency room doctor who cared for her dog bite, begins a relationship with her widowed mother. Are the disturbing changes in Cassie’s behavior—ones that lead her to question what she’s been told about her father’s death in a car accident when she was 11 months old—merely the result of Shute’s strict discipline or something more sinister?

The author of five previous novels, including The Emperor’s Children and The Woman Upstairs, Messud masterfully portrays Julia’s mounting dismay at her friend’s choices and the events they set in motion, as the girls are carried far from a time “when we could never have imagined coming unstuck.” For all the suspense Messud sustains after a desperate Cassie recklessly digs too deeply for the truth about her father’s death, the poignant depiction of the girls’ estrangement—fueled by their inevitable path toward adulthood—is an equally compelling reason to read this haunting novel.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Julia Robinson and Cassie Burnes are best friends, enjoying a carefree life on the cusp of adolescence in Royston, a sleepy town in the North Shore of Massachusetts. The unsettling changes that upend their placid existence are the subject of The Burning Girl, veteran novelist Claire Messud’s penetrating psychological thriller about “what it means to be a girl growing up.”

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From the opening pages of Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward’s (Salvage the Bones) new novel, you know you’re in for a unique experience among the pecan trees and dusty roads of rural Mississippi. This intricately layered story combines mystical elements with a brutal view of racial tensions in the modern-day American South.

Ward shifts perspective among three characters: 13-year-old mixed-race boy Jojo, who lives with his mother and toddler sister, Kayla, in the home of his black grandparents, Mam and Pop; Leonie, Jojo’s black mother, who struggles with drug addiction and sees visions of her murdered brother; and Richie, a young boy who died decades earlier and whom 15-year-old Pop knew when they were at Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

Jojo’s white father, Michael, the son of a man who abhors Leonie because she’s the black woman “his son had babies with,” has been in Parchman for many years. When Leonie learns of Michael’s release, she, Jojo and Kayla drive across Mississippi to pick him up. But the trip, which includes unexpected illnesses and a stop for drugs that Leonie wants to sell, is more eventful than the family had anticipated.

Visitations from dead people, tales of snakes that turn into “scaly birds” whose feathers allow recipients to fly—this material would have felt mannered in the hands of a lesser writer. But Ward skillfully weaves realistic and supernatural elements into a powerful narrative. The writing, though matter-of-fact in its depiction of prejudice, is poetic throughout, as when Jojo says that, as Michael hugs him after a fight with Leonie, “something in his face was pulled tight, wrong, like underneath his skin he was crisscrossed with tape.”

Sing, Unburied, Sing is an important work from an astute observer of race relations in 21st-century America.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Jesmyn Ward for Sing, Unburied, Sing.

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From the opening pages of Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward’s (Salvage the Bones) new novel, you know you’re in for a unique experience among the pecan trees and dusty roads of rural Mississippi. This intricately layered story combines mystical elements with a brutal view of racial tensions in the modern-day American South.

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It takes a brilliant writer indeed to spin the straw of everyday life into gold, and Bernard MacLaverty is such a writer. After reading his latest, Midwinter Break, you won’t wonder why he was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his 1997 novel, Grace Notes. This tale of two ordinary pensioners satisfies in ways that a really good book should: The characters are memorable, the writing is luminous and you never want it to end.

Did I say the couple in the story is ordinary? They are and they aren’t. There’s Gerry Gilmore, who was an architect, and his wife, Stella, a former schoolteacher. They live in Glasgow, Scotland, and when the book opens they’re preparing to go on a four-day winter vacation to Amsterdam. Stella is a font of goodness: interested, quietly intelligent, brimful of love and compassion. Gerry is smart and a bit stodgy. He’s funny and loves his wife. He’s also an alcoholic. One of the reasons they’re going to Amsterdam is for Stella to figure out whether she can keep on living with him. It’s a midwinter break in more ways than one.

MacLaverty is superb when it comes to revealing the minutiae of a long-married couple’s life: Stella remembering to put in her eye drops to ease her dry eyes; their custom of chastely kissing in elevators; their bedtime rituals; Gerry thinking up ways to hide how much he’s drinking, even though the perceptive Stella knows the truth. MacLaverty layers on these particulars until we come to deeply know these people. The reader begins to think, I hope nothing happens that’ll make me not love them! Nothing does, but the reader does learn of the primal wound that knocked this relationship just a bit askew. It happened early in their marriage, was unforgivably atrocious and not in any way their fault. Yet it may have set Gerry to his drinking problem and certainly troubled Stella’s strong Catholic faith.

Midwinter Break is a slim book, which proves you don’t have to write a Middlemarch-esque doorstopper to produce a masterpiece. This quietly passionate, knowing novel is bound to be read and savored for years to come.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It takes a brilliant writer indeed to spin the straw of everyday life into gold, and Bernard MacLaverty is such a writer. After reading his latest, Midwinter Break, you won’t wonder why he was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his 1997 novel, Grace Notes. This tale of two ordinary pensioners satisfies in ways that a really good book should: The characters are memorable, the writing is luminous and you never want it to end.

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Nicole Krauss opens her challenging and illuminating fourth novel, Forest Dark, with a disappearance. Jules Epstein, a wealthy, elderly Manhattanite, returns to his birth city of Tel Aviv on a mysterious mission—and vanishes without a trace. In a parallel storyline, a novelist and mother of two named Nicole travels to Tel Aviv, hoping to disappear into fiction. At home in Brooklyn, she’s in a creative slump and a foundering marriage, and thinks a change of scene might turn things around.

Readers can be forgiven for wondering how much of the fictional Nicole’s storyline is based on Krauss’ own relationship with former husband (and fellow writer) Jonathan Safran Foer, with whom she has two children. But it isn’t long before the absorbing fictional world Krauss has created drowns out any literary gossip. Both Epstein and Nicole encounter enigmatic strangers who seduce them with stories: Epstein discovers he might have ties to the biblical King David, while Nicole is given a suitcase that is said to contain lost manuscripts of Franz Kafka. These revelations place both characters on surprising trajectories.

Though the story at times might feel meandering, Krauss is always in control. The myriad literary allusions and her ruminations on the nature of story and on boundaries of all sorts—including those of reality—deepen the journeys of her two main characters. Like Krauss’ previous books Great House and The History of Love, Forest Dark slowly builds to a powerful emotional crescendo and an ending that feels revelatory.

Haunting and reflective, poetic and wise, this is another masterful work from one of America’s best writers.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Nicole Krauss opens her challenging and illuminating fourth novel, Forest Dark, with a disappearance. Jules Epstein, a wealthy, elderly Manhattanite, returns to his birth city of Tel Aviv on a mysterious mission—and vanishes without a trace. In a parallel storyline, a novelist and mother of two named Nicole travels to Tel Aviv, hoping to disappear into fiction. At home in Brooklyn, she’s in a creative slump and a foundering marriage, and thinks a change of scene might turn things around.

The toll of addiction and the burden it inflicts on families dealing with that curse are the difficult subjects of Lindsay Hunter’s bleak second novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry.

When Greg Reinart’s son, GJ, goes missing for three weeks, the retired accountant wearily crams himself into a compact RV and drives from his West Virginia home to Florida to search for the 30-year-old, who’s cycled through multiple visits to rehab and failed efforts at recovery most of his adult life. In Florida, Greg also must deal with a mountain of unfinished business remaining after his long-ago divorce from GJ’s mother, Marie. “Parents of the Lost, a species all their own,” is how Greg thinks of himself and his ex-wife.

As Hunter reveals through Greg’s eyes, the damage wreaked by GJ’s drug use has infected his father’s life. Greg’s fondness for junk food gradually has turned him into a “lump with eyes,” and his own drinking has become problematic. In his despair he fantasizes about putting his arms around his son, bitterly envisioning them at “Rock bottom, but together.”

Mirroring the darkness of the novel, Hunter’s Florida is not a place of gleaming beaches and stately palm trees. Instead, it’s world of strip malls and strip clubs, a twilight land through which Greg wanders, following a trail of increasingly faint clues to GJ’s whereabouts as his own demons pursue him. “Why did we choose each other? Why did we choose this life?” Marie asks as she and Greg pick over the wreckage of their former life.

Eat Only When You’re Hungry is far from a comforting read. Instead, it’s a starkly realistic portrait of a family in crisis, a journey through purgatory with precious few road signs to help the travelers on their way.

The toll of addiction and the burden it inflicts on families dealing with that curse are the difficult subjects of Lindsay Hunter’s bleak second novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry.

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When Stella Krakus, curator at a renowned Manhattan art museum, finds an unusual map among the possessions of a missing colleague, the strangest week of her life turns into an insatiable quest to discover the map’s origin. Through the smart, dazzling prose of a witty narrator, accomplished poet Lucy Ives creates a mysterious historical adventure sure to delight and inspire.

Thirty-something Stella is enduring almost more than she can handle. Complete with a fading workplace affair, annoying appearances by her almost-ex-husband, lunch with her glamorous and successful mother and a museum sponsor who wants to take over the world’s water supply, her week could not be more bizarre—until her coworker Paul is pronounced missing. As Stella begins to solve the mystery behind the map of a historical utopia, she is pulled into the museum’s origins and realizes there was much more to Paul and his work than she knew, with the potential to alter her life and her career as she knows it.

Impossible Views of the World is an original debut ringing with smart prose, engaging humor and cultivated taste. Similar to the brilliance on display in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Ives’ genius is apparent in the intricate way she weaves ironic confession, romantic comedy and artful treatise with explorations into the historic art world. The novel is best read thoughtfully to fully capture the details of Stella’s academic discoveries and the playful writing style incorporated into the banter between the lively characters. Readers are invited into Stella’s mind as she navigates the plethora of emotions that come with an early-30s crisis. Full of intelligence and imagination, this relatable literary mystery will charm even the most apprentice art devotee.

When Stella Krakus, curator at a renowned Manhattan art museum, finds an unusual map among the possessions of a missing colleague, the strangest week of her life turns into an insatiable quest to discover the map’s origin. Through the smart, dazzling prose of a witty narrator, accomplished poet Lucy Ives creates a mysterious historical adventure sure to delight and inspire.

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With the touching and very funny story of Arthur Less, author Andrew Sean Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli) takes readers on an around-the-world tour, leaping from Mexico City to Berlin, from Marrakech to Kyoto, in a grand midlife adventure of the heart.

Gay novelist Less—like anyone with such a name—is a hapless, dreamy hero, a man straight out of a James Thurber story. He’s known more for his relationship with a much older, Pulitzer-winning poet than for his own work. Now, his most recent lover is getting married, and in an attempt to avoid the upcoming nuptials, Less has decided to accept every literary invitation on his desk. It just so happens that Less is about to turn 50, and his latest novel will soon be rejected by his publisher.

Dressed in his trademark blue suit, Less adorably butchers the German language, nearly falls in love in Paris, celebrates his birthday in the desert and, somewhere along the way, discovers something new and fragile about the passing of time, about the coming and going of love, and what it means to be the fool of your own narrative. It’s nothing less than wonderful.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With the touching and very funny story of Arthur Less, Andrew Sean Greer takes readers from Mexico City to Berlin, from Marrakech to Kyoto, in a grand midlife adventure of the heart.

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One might question some of her choices, but no one could accuse Maria Pierce, the protagonist of New People, Danzy Senna’s provocative new novel, of ordinariness. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given that she—like her equally light-skinned, dreadlocked fiancé, Khalil, whom she met at Stanford in the early 1990s—is biracial. They are two of society’s “New People,” children born to mixed-race couples in the late ’60s and early ’70s, offspring she calls “the progeny of the Renaissance of Interracial Unions.”

It’s November 1996. Maria and Khalil, subjects of a documentary about biracial children, live in Brooklyn as she works on a dissertation about the Jonestown massacre. She’s the sort of well-meaning person who speaks in broken English when talking to someone with a foreign accent. And she is the adopted daughter of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, woman who—like a poet Maria has recently become infatuated with—was “old-school” black, with dark skin rather than the “octoroon-gray eyes or butterscotch skin” of New People.

The poet, a “shaved-head black man,” and Maria’s infatuation with him are the sparks for much of the novel’s drama. Her obsession is so intense that she tracks down the poet at his apartment building. But before Maria can knock on his door, his confused white neighbor mistakes her for her Spanish nanny. Maria’s willingness to go along with the charade of being the baby’s nurse, even to the point of adopting a Spanish accent, is one of many ways Senna dramatizes Maria’s uncertainty and despair over the direction of her life.

Expertly plotted and full of dark humor, New People is a thoughtful and unforgettable look at race and class at the dawn of the 21st century.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Expertly plotted and full of dark humor, New People is a thoughtful and unforgettable look at race and class at the dawn of the 21st century.

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It’s a struggle to remain the heroes of our own stories. What we know in our hearts, that we are Jason Bourne or Katniss Everdeen, clashes daily with reality, where we coax kids out of the minivan each morning and lug individually bagged, nut-free snacks to a wearying number of Little League games.

But even those of us bogged down in the quotidian have stories. And luckily, we have Tom Perrotta to tell them.

Mrs. Fletcher, the acclaimed author’s first novel since 2011, is a smart, grown-up look at what happens when growing older doesn’t turn out as expected.

Eve Fletcher is alone. Forty-six, abandoned by her husband for a younger woman and left with an empty nest by her college-bound son, Brendan (whom she dearly loves but finds hard to like), Eve fears the days ahead. Her only consolations are small but not insignificant: She doesn’t hate her job and she still looks good in jeans.

Eve is, in fact, a MILF (if you don’t know the term, go stream American Pie). She knows this because a late-night text from an unknown number informs her, “U R my MILF!” The text sends Eve on a journey of discovery, both amusing and so cringe-worthy that you’ll want to read with your fingers covering your face.

Eve’s struggles are matched by those of her son. Brendan is a “bro,” a frat-hungry jock who is unable to rein in his sense of entitlement, even in the progressive world of college. When he’s called out for the boorish, misogynistic behavior that worked like a charm in high school, he is forced to confront the type of person he wants to be.

Perrotta makes a sharp, satirical return to the class of people he skewered in Little Children (2004). A suburban anthropologist in the tradition of John Updike, he is so spot on about people who live “comfortably” that reading him makes you deliciously uncomfortable.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Mrs. Fletcher, the acclaimed author’s first novel since 2011, is a smart, grown-up look at what happens when growing older doesn’t turn out as expected.

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In a startlingly relevant update, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire relocates Sophocles’ Antigone to present-day London and weaves a timely tale of two British Muslim families with differing ideas about bigotry, belief and loyalty.

After years of devoting herself to raising her younger siblings, Isma Pasha is free to return to college and complete her degree in sociology. She worries about leaving behind her beautiful, headstrong sister, Aneeka, but of even more concern is Aneeka’s twin brother, Parvaiz, who has disappeared. Parvaiz surfaces in Syria, pursuing the dreams of Adil Pasha, the jihadist father he barely knew. The two sisters are devastated by his choice and frightened by the intrusion of the British Security Service into their lives.

When Isma meets handsome Eamonn Lone in the college coffee shop, she recognizes him as the son of controversial political figure Karamat Lone, who was a member of Parliament at the time of Adil’s death and is now British Home Secretary. But it is Aneeka who sees in Eamonn a unique chance to get her brother home and starts an intimate relationship with him. Is it love? Or simply political manipulation?

Home Fire is Shamsie’s seventh and most accomplished novel. The emotionally compelling plot is well served by her lucid storytelling, and she digs into complex issues with confidence. Divided into five sections, one for each of the main characters, the narrative combines the themes of Sophocles’ tragedy with this most up-to-date of stories. As this deftly constructed page-turner moves swiftly toward its inevitable conclusion, it forces questions about what sacrifice you would make for family, for love.

Read our Q&A with Kamila Shamsie for Home Fire.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, August 2017
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Reviews and synopses won’t prepare you for the experience of reading this book. That’s what it is—an experience of the exploration of grief and readjustment after loss. Delicate but not frail, analytical yet not over-thought, Zinzi Clemmons’ debut novel is a great success. It’s a multidimensional study of life pre-and post-bereavement executed in an incredibly creative manner.

Thandi is an African-American woman raised in Philadelphia, born to a South African mother and an American father. Her identity is split between the two countries, and she explores the significance of race and wealth presented by each through intelligent and strategic storytelling. She reveals her personality through nonlinear vignettes, which are often only a half-page or even a sentence long, but her prose is so powerful that the story lacks nothing. Thandi’s mother is diagnosed with cancer and ultimately succumbs to the disease, which sends Thandi and her father spiraling on separate tangents of grief. Thandi struggles to understand her emotions in a way that is sometimes starkly logical as she draws charts and graphs to explain them. Some days she doesn’t try to understand; she just retreats to public places to avoid her thoughts. In an intermingling storyline that takes place following her mother’s death, she becomes a mother herself, which challenges her every pre-existing belief about motherhood. She attempts to accept other forms of loss such as identity, connection to the past and romantic relationships.

What We Lose contains photographs of various supporting, nonfictional world events that inform Thandi’s character and the roundabout way she expands her story. This novel is not only a journey with Thandi in life after loss, but a true exploration of the complexities of identity and womanhood.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Zinzi Clemmons takes us Behind the Book

Reviews and synopses won’t prepare you for the experience of reading this book. That’s what it is—an experience of the exploration of grief and readjustment after loss. Delicate but not frail, analytical yet not over-thought, Zinzi Clemmons’ debut novel is a great success. It’s a multidimensional study of life pre-and post-bereavement executed in an incredibly creative manner.

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