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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Silver Linings Playbook author Matthew Quick channels the political anger that is all the rage these days in this scorching family drama. The Reason You’re Alive is narrated with ire and eloquence by David Granger, a Vietnam vet in his late 60s who has just had brain surgery. It’s as if Holden Caulfield grew up to be a reflective, even soulful, Archie Bunker. David’s voice is intimate, personal, occasionally poetic and sensible, even sympathetic. He is, however, filled with right-wing rage directed at everybody—from the government that sent him off to war to his art-dealer son, Hank, a liberal and a hypocrite (two of David’s least favorite traits).

David is recounting his life story for an unspecified report, and we spiral back to his wartime experiences, the harrowing meeting that led to his marriage, the tragedy that followed and the roots of his rocky relationship with Hank. Like Holden, the one thing David seems to love unequivocally is a little girl—Hank’s 7-year-old daughter, Ella. The question coursing throughout The Reason You’re Alive is whether or not Ella—or anything—will prevent David from yielding to his darkest impulses.

For the first half of the novel, the force of David’s voice is electric. After some time, his rants begin to wear thin, dabbling in a certain kind of narrow-mindedness and self-pity we see in angry folks on both sides of the political aisle. The book does move toward an emotional conclusion, offering Hank and David an opportunity for redemption. For all of David’s political bluster, this is a touching, old-fashioned drama about the ties that sometimes choke, but always bind.

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