BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, December 2017

The third novel by Australian author Ashley Hay is an engrossing and insightful portrait of two women living in Brisbane, Australia: Elsie, now in her 90s, a widow of 40 years and recently relocated to an assisted living facility by her children; and Lucy, a 30-something mother of a 2-year-old and wife to Ben, a journalist.

Elsie has just sold her home of 60 years to Lucy’s young family. Throughout the novel, Hay moves back and forth through Elsie’s years, giving the reader introspective looks into her life: from her days as a vibrant, adventurous young woman to her years mothering her twins, Elaine and Don; from the time she stepped out of her ordinary life to have her portrait painted to the present day, when she looks into her mirror at “the facility” and says to herself, “I have no idea who you are or why you’re here.”

Lucy’s chapters revolve around the difficulties of new motherhood—the crying, the late nights, the sudden, obstinate behavior of her young son. She increasingly takes out her frustrations on her husband, whom she sees as blissfully removed from most of the childrearing as he enjoys his daily routine at the newspaper and his frequent work-related trips abroad.

Numerous scenes in this thoughtful novel will linger in the reader’s memory—like Elsie’s husband, Clem, graciously reaching out to an old neighbor who divorced and moved away, but could be found “wandering around his old neighborhood, looking for his past.” Or the night when Clem dies in his sleep at age 54, when Elsie realizes that “suddenly all the plans they’d thought of making were too late.”

A lyrically written portrayal of the lives of two women tied together by memories and the house they share, A Hundred Small Lessons is sure to be enjoyed by readers of Kate Morton, another Brisbane author.

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

When it comes to hitting rock bottom, Joshua Max Feldman is a deft recording angel. Both in his first novel, The Book of Jonah, and now again in Start Without Me, Feldman shines a loving and unsparing light on ordinary persons at the worst moments of their lives.

Adam turned to the bottle after his career as a rock musician spiraled, after his beloved partner Johanna in the band lost her mind, after he realized he’d been chasing the wrong dream. A recovering alcoholic is still an alcoholic, and Adam can barely endure the pressure of a Thanksgiving family reunion. This is where the novel opens, zooming in on Adam in the middle of the nightmare, camped out on a bed in the basement of his childhood home, barely able to face the “music” of his family’s crushing pity, and their even more crushing hope for him.

Marissa slept with an old flame she met on a flight she was working. Being a flight attendant wasn’t something she’d planned on, any more than being unfaithful to her husband, any more than the terrible weight of feeling constantly inadequate as a wife, a daughter-in-law, a human being. Now she’s pregnant with the other man’s child. Now she’s on her guilty way to her in-laws’ house for Thanksgiving, barely able to face the “music” of his family’s crushing contempt, and their even more crushing kindness towards her.

This is the day Marissa and Adam, total strangers, meet at the restaurant of a hotel lobby near the airport. They have nothing in common except for their despair and their inability to confront their own enormous predicaments. Beware! These two lost souls do not redeem each other. In Feldman’s hands, life is too true and too weird for such a happy ending.

With consummate compassion, Feldman takes note of every awkward movement of their unlikely, painful, comical and consequentially graceful Thanksgiving together.

One sunny morning in 2010, a man streaks—quite literally—against morning drive-time traffic on Los Angeles’ 110 Freeway, the gray scar etched into the left side of the city’s face. Talk about a Kodak moment, and it’s witnessed by multiple characters in the latest novel by Ivy Pochoda (The Art of Disappearing, Visitation Street), who then backtracks from this freeze frame to uncover the forces that have impelled these human molecules to coagulate in this space.

Toggling back and forth between 2006 and 2010, Pochoda tugs on each character’s strand, disentangling it from the knot of LA traffic and the knot of interconnection to reveal a tapestry that is more gritty than pretty. It spans a landscape that stretches from the upper-middle class to the destitute, from Skid Row tents and Beverlywood McMansions to desiccated cabins in the high desert’s dystopian Wonder Valley.

We encounter good people who have done bad things, bad people who have done bad things (but occasionally can’t help doing good, if perhaps accidentally) and a whole bunch of folks looking for, if not necessarily redemption, at least a moment of grace. Pochoda is a master at homing in on the details of both exterior and interior landscapes and crafting characters so palpable that you can feel blood throbbing in their temples and rivulets of sweat evaporating off their necks.

It’s not a far stretch to consider Pochoda to be in the company of James Ellroy, Michael Connelly and T. Jefferson Parker, but the two novelists that most often leap to mind as peers are Walter Mosley and National Book Award finalist Kem Nunn. It wouldn’t be a big surprise to find Wonder Valley on the short list for several awards itself.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Ivy Pochoda for Wonder Valley.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and spent several years commuting daily on the 110 from his home in Inglewood to his office at Warner Bros. Records in Burbank. He never saw a naked guy jogging on it.

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

Come what may, life goes on. And on. And on. That’s the hauntingly real premise of Jon McGregor’s fascinating new novel, Reservoir 13.

After a young girl—Rebecca or Becky or Bex Shaw—goes missing on New Year’s Eve on the frozen moors of an unnamed English village, the community members each must deal with her loss in their own way. Some mourn longer than others. Some have constant dreams and fears of what may have befallen her. Others hold onto the slimmest of hopes that she will be found safe and sound. Most manage to let go and move on, even though the hurt of that day always remains. McGregor chronicles it all over a period of 13 long, tiresome years.

Unlike most novels that delve closely into the life of a main protagonist, McGregor distances the reader in a more omniscient fashion, picking and choosing whom to look in on and when. Sharing only fleeting glimpses of their lives like an unattached observer, McGregor darts in and out of the lives of his characters in seemingly random fashion. Chapters are divided into years, years into quick flashes of months or days—moments in time all indelibly etched into the fabric of the community, into the souls of the people therein, and into the hearts and minds of readers.

Despite the unusual style—no direct dialogue and no paragraph breaks here—McGregor’s lyrical prose and sense of detail totally immerse the reader. Reaching the end of a chapter is like coming up for a brief gulp of air before diving in to see what happens next.

The novel was longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, though it was edged off the shortlist. McGregor also made the longlist in 2002 with his debut novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things.

It’s an old but effective technique: the use of oral histories—interviews with witnesses to past events—to paint a picture of an era through multiple perspectives. Cristina García (Dreaming in Cuban) employs this technique to great effect in Here in Berlin, a quilt of a novel that creates a hypnotic portrait of the former East German city during and after World War II.

A Cuban-American writer known as the Visitor returns to Germany after leaving 31 years ago to find stories about “the human fallout from Cuba’s long association with the Soviet bloc.” What follows are brief chapters in which residents of Berlin, including World War II survivors now living in nursing homes, share their stories. Among them are Ernesto, a former night watchman of a Cuban electric-fan factory who spent five months as a POW on a German submarine, and one of the few female lawyers in Germany after the war, whose job was to defend clients on trial for war crimes.

These histories range from grimly humorous (such as the story about the Ministry of Culture official whose superiors asked him to invent a dance craze that would “give the West a (managed) run for its money” and learned an “unexpurgated mambo” from a Cuban agent) to chilling (an unrepentant former Nazi criminal boasts about his wartime actions).

If some of the histories are sketchy, most provide a powerful evocation of the continuing effect of the Nazi era on Berlin’s inhabitants. As the Visitor states at the end of the novel, there is “poetry in the listening.” And that’s what Here in Berlin is: a poetic pastiche of rationalizations and regrets, and a testament to the challenge of reconciling a difficult past.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Cristina García for Here in Berlin.

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

In Robin Sloan’s latest novel, Sourdough, Lois Clary is a 20-something Michigan transplant, well on her way to being one of the rich and geeky residents of Silicon Valley. Working hard at promising start-up General Dexterity, she has joined the techie milieu with her overpriced apartment where she hardly spends any time and a meal-replacement slurry she consumes two to three times a week. But like all young people starting off, Lois is content and hasn’t yet felt the void of being the proverbial peg in the unstoppable machine.

An epiphany transpires in the most unassuming way, when Lois takes possession of a sourdough starter from the two guys who used to run her favorite neighborhood take-out joint. Lois knows nothing about being a foodie, but even she can’t deny the mysterious vibes from this starter, which seems to beckon her with its singing and talking.

And so Lois bakes. Starting in the tiny virgin oven of her apartment to a brick oven she builds herself in the backyard to the industrial kitchen of a peculiar collective called the Marrow Fair, the sourdough ends up being more consuming than the high-paying job that landed her here in the first place.

But this isn’t a story of how to give up your day job and start a neighborhood bakery. Sloan has imagined a funny and curious novel unlike anything else, a perfect combination of self-discovery through all sorts of weird passions. Like truly good sourdough, this namesake is the perfectly tangy, chewy and airy addition to anyone’s reading list—minus the gluten and calories, of course.