Since Charles Bock’s unforgettable 2008 debut novel, Beautiful Children, seared us with its bleak portrait of teen runaways and the Vegas fringe, I’ve married, moved across the country, lived in three homes and fathered two children. And all the while, periodically, I’ve wondered, when the heck is this guy going to write another book?

Well, nearly eight years after showing up on the New York Times Notable Books of the Year list, Bock gives us Alice & Oliver, at once a heart-wrenching story of a young couple’s world crumbling and an explanation, of sorts, of just where Bock has been all these years.

In 2009, when their daughter was six months old, Bock’s wife, Diana, was diagnosed with cancer. She died two-and-a-half years later. Out of that time comes this book.

Alice and Oliver Culvert are the parents of a newborn named Doe. It is 1993, and they live in New York City’s edgy (at the time) Meatpacking District. They are both creative people: Oliver writes code and Alice works steadily in the fashion world. We meet Alice first. She is healthy for about two inches of type. In paragraph one she coughs up blood on the street. On page six she is nearly dead. By page 12, Alice has cancer, and this powerful, riveting book becomes an exercise in keeping your lip from trembling.

As Alice’s treatment begins, she and Oliver are the perfect couple, very much in love. Oliver bares his teeth at cancer, and toggles between being Alice’s protector and her jailer. But Alice deteriorates, and the duo is worn down by the labyrinthine medical system and the lacerating effects of treatment and uncertainty. They turn away from each other. Alice has a bizarre, fraught encounter with an alcoholic musician named Mervyn, who hits on her in the hospital—somehow without being totally repulsive. Oliver, meanwhile, finds himself adrift when not sitting bedside, and explores outlets that may prove poisonous to their marriage.

Bock, unsurprisingly, says he cannot imagine a more difficult book to write. Nor is it, emotionally, an easy read. Yet this deep, honest and layered exploration of disease is not depressing. On the contrary, it’s a life-affirming portrait of people trying their best while enduring the worst.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Though terrorist acts may have different motivations, they share a common factor: the suffering wrought on the victims’ families. That point is dramatized with chilling effectiveness in Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, a novel in which questions of politics and religion are rarely far from the thoughts of its main characters.

Mahajan, whose 2008 debut novel, Family Planning, was published in nine countries, begins his story with a 1996 marketplace bombing in India. The Khuranas, who are Hindu, have sent their two young sons to an open-air market to pick up their television from an electrician. The boys bring their Muslim friend Mansoor, the Ahmeds’ only child, along. An explosion “under the bonnet of a parked white Maruti 800” kills the Khurana boys, but spares Mansoor. His injury seems minor at first, but when he gets to America years later to study computer science, his wrist and neck pains become so severe that he’s unable to type.

The novel shifts perspective throughout to encompass multiple viewpoints and demonstrate the intersection of lives affected by that initial blast, including Mansoor, who abandons his secularity after he experiences prejudice; a bomb maker named Shaukat “Shockie” Guru; and a Muslim activist who becomes more radicalized as the novel progresses.

The focus wanders a bit during detailed passages about Indian politics and Mansoor’s religious conversion, but this remains a compelling story about extremism and its effects. Much of the writing is beautiful and evocative, as when the bereaved Khuranas awake to find “two parallel lines of salt” on their sheets from “shoulders soggy with tears” after the death of their sons. Some terrorist acts have relatively few casualties, but as Mahajan eloquently points out, even small acts of violence have devastating repercussions. In the world of political terrorism, there are no small bombs.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, April 2016

Australian author Dominic Smith has brought historic events and vibrant places to life in books like The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre and Bright and Distant Shores. His fourth novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, centers on a single 17th-century painting that changes the course of three lives over four centuries and across several continents. 

The novel has three narrative threads. In 1631, Sara de Vos became the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the Dutch Guild of St. Luke. By 1957, her only known remaining work, “At the Edge of a Wood,” hangs in the bedroom of Marty de Groot, a wealthy patent lawyer in Manhattan. In the shabbier reaches of Brooklyn, Ellie Shipley, an art history graduate student with a background in art restoration, is approached about creating a forgery. Shortly after, the de Vos is stolen, and the clues lead to Ellie’s grimy studio. 

Decades later, Ellie is a prominent curator in Sydney, mounting an exhibition on women painters of the Dutch Golden Age. Both paintings—the original and the forgery—are en route to her museum, and Ellie is forced to confront what she did. Behind the contemporary mystery of the forged work are questions about de Vos herself and what led her to break with convention, despite the strict Guild rules governing women painters and subject matter. Though the way these elements intersect may be guessed by astute readers early on, the pleasure here is watching Smith control all three stories—the pertinent questions are answered in ways that not only convince, but also satisfy. 

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos does what the best books can do: sweep the reader into unfamiliar worlds filled with intriguing characters. The immense challenges faced by women in the arts, both past and present, are also skillfully rendered, and the gritty details—from behind-the-scenes museum work to the formulas of an art forger—are managed with finesse. Smith’s characters are so real and the novel plotted so thoughtfully that one finishes with a sigh of contentment. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is a true pleasure to read.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Add the female protagonist of Forty Rooms, Olga Grushin’s moving new novel, to the roster of characters who have grappled with the age-old question of art vs. domesticity. Should one lead a life dedicated to an artistic pursuit—in this case, the writing of poetry—or to one’s family? The dilemma her protagonist faces may be eternal, but the device Grushin uses to tell her story is unique: Each of the 40 chapters occurs in a room of either a library or the narrator’s current residence.

The shifts in Grushin’s narrative style are a subtle way to underscore the difficulty of this question. The opening chapters, during which the unnamed protagonist grows up in Russia, are told in first person present tense. In these enchanting early pages, we learn that the narrator is prone to visions, first of a mermaid who sifts through her mother’s jewels, and then of a bearded, barefoot man who encourages the narrator’s artistic inclinations.

Later, when she attends university in the United States, the novel shifts to first person past tense. While her ambitious childhood friend Olga, the first Soviet to attend an American university, gives interviews and enjoys the limelight, the narrator quietly pursues her degree and experiments with writing poetry cycles.

The novel is told in third person, once the protagonist marries Paul Caldwell, a business major from a wealthy family. Soon, the woman who once dressed in thrift-store clothing is living in a fancy home with a ballroom and gold-plated faucets. Now referred to as Mrs. Caldwell, she gives up her artistic dreams and becomes stay-at-home mom to six children. But she fantasizes about the life she could have had and wonders whether she made the right choices.

Grushin occasionally succumbs to cliché, such as having the narrator examine her reflection in a mirror before assessing her life, but, for the most part, Forty Rooms is a sensitive and exquisitely told meditation on the pleasures of art.

Helen Oyeyemi, who was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2013, continues to intrigue with her first collection of stories What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. Each of the nine playful stories centers around a key, both metaphorical and literal, opening doors to the kind of fantastical plots and insightful observations that readers have come to expect from her.

Oyeyemi’s stories carry with them more than a whiff of fairy tales—from the opener, “Books and Roses,” about two women in Barcelona whose search for lost loved ones lead them from a private library to a secret locked garden, to “Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose,” a fractured take on Little Red Riding Hood. “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” is the sinister story of puppeteers in thrall to their puppets with echoes of Pinocchio’s existential desire for realness and the chill of adolescents competing for sexual attention. Cautionary tales such as “Sorry Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” and “If a Book is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That” remind the reader that sometimes things are off limits for good reasons. Though the stories’ plots are not linked, recurring characters pop up in more than one tale, and several are students or teachers at the school of puppetry that serves as the setting of some of the collection’s spookiest moments. Despite the allusions to haunted houses, padlocked gardens and murderous tyrants, the tone is cheerful and the stories surprisingly upbeat; in “A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society,” the conclusion is downright sentimental.

 Oyeyemi has been inspired by African folklore and ghost stories since her debut, The Icarus Girl, and here she pulls from sources as varied as Cuban mythology, Edgar Allen Poe and the Brothers Grimm. Though a few convoluted tales fall flat, the best are cleverly crafted to both embody and subvert the archetypes they explore. Her enthusiasm for a world where witches and phantoms coexist with psychiatrists and graduate students is infectious. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours leaves readers with the captivating notion that behind every locked door lies additional mysteries.

For better or worse, Joyce Maynard is best known for her memoir At Home in the World, which chronicled (among other things) a year-long love affair Maynard had with J.D Salinger when she was 18 and the reclusive Catcher in the Rye author was 53. It should be added, however, that Maynard has slowly but surely compiled an impressive body of fiction, including 2009’s Labor Day, which was turned into a 2013 film starring Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet. 

Maynard’s latest is the cleverly titled Under the Influence. Helen’s marriage to Dwight, initially exciting, has fallen apart. Then one evening, a habit of drinking too much wine before bed has disastrous consequences: Helen loses custody of her beloved son, Ollie. Having kicked booze, Helen—a photographer who must also do catering service to make extra money—meets and falls under the influence of a glamorous, wealthy “magic couple” named Ava and Swift. They seem to be everything Helen wants to be—and more importantly, they offer to help Helen win back custody of Ollie. 

At times Maynard’s characters are drawn a touch heavy-handed, so that readers are likely to see the looming problems in Helen’s life long before she does. Nevertheless, Maynard deftly portrays Helen’s sense of helplessness and vulnerability as events build to a disturbing climax. Under the Influence is ultimately an absorbing portrait of complex characters confronting real problems.

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Update: A previous version of this review listed Josh Brolin as an Oscar winner. We have corrected the error online.

Dexter Palmer’s second novel, Version Control, is the kind of rich, multilayered book that often feels like it is raising more questions than answers. The first is the question of exactly what type of book it is: Is it a deeply personal story of a marriage and the human condition, or is it a cerebral exploration of the world of astrophysics and time travel? Is it science fiction or literary fiction? 

A description does little to clear this matter up. Version Control tells the story of married couple Rebecca and Philip Wright. Rebecca works in customer support for a web-based dating service, while Philip is a scientist who has been toiling on what some might call a time machine (though he adamantly refers to it as a “causality violation device”) that has made him a joke in the physics community. Though the two have known heartbreak and disappointment, their life together is generally comfortable. Yet Rebecca can’t shake the feeling that the world is “wrong.” Could Philip’s device be the way to set things right? Or might it actually be the source of Rebecca’s anxiety and unease?

Expansive in scope, Version Control burrows into issues of science and technology, religion, relationships, racism and free will. It would be easy for issues to overshadow the story, but Palmer—who has a Ph.D. in English from Princeton—deftly keeps the many components in harmony. The result is an intellectual novel that feels surprisingly intimate and accessible. Weighty yet emotionally rewarding, Version Control will appeal to all curious readers, regardless of their scientific background.

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The latest novel from the bestselling author of Life of Pi, Yann Martel, is a story told in three parts, featuring three men, each dealing with the loss of a loved one. 

We start in the early 1900s in Lisbon, where Tomás grapples with the unexpected loss of his lover and their son by deciding to walk only backwards as a show of contempt for God. Stranger still is his mission to use his rich uncle’s automobile to find a treasure that he believes will forever shake faith in Christianity, furthering his defiance of heaven. These heavy themes of death and religion are lightened by humorous (sometimes laugh out loud) depictions of the results of Tomás’ backward motion, as well as his utter ineptitude with the car.

In the second section, set 35 years later, we meet Dr. Eusebio Lozora, a pathologist. This fan of Agatha Christie murder mysteries finds himself performing an equally riveting medical autopsy that is somehow linked to Tomás’ tragedy. Grief is the main theme here, which Martel skillfully uses to challenge all of the doctor’s scientific knowledge. 

In the final section, another 50 years have passed. In Ontario, Canada, we meet Senator Peter Tovy, who is falling to pieces personally and professionally after the loss of his beloved wife. An unusual and unexpected course of action makes him the owner of a chimpanzee, Odo, with whom he decides to live in his ancestral village in the high mountains of Portugal. There, history reveals itself with time, decisively connecting the three parts of the novel. 

After such a gripping and detailed narrative, the final conclusion seems a little too sudden and unanticipated. Even so, The High Mountains of Portugal doesn’t disappoint in its twists and turns, which leave the reader working like a detective to connect all the dots. Filled with humor, sadness, love and adventure, it’s a perfect balance for those who want a feel-good book that still provides an insight into the human psyche.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Good on Paper, Rachel Cantor’s ingenious follow-up to 2014’s A Highly Unlikely Scenario, is set in the final months of 1999. Single mother Shira Greene is 44 and works as a temp at a company that makes prosthetic legs. She hates the job, and why wouldn’t she? Her dream is to be a writer and translator, a vocation life has forced her to put aside. Employment notwithstanding, Shira has a comfortable life. She and her 7-year-old daughter, Andi, share a Manhattan apartment with Shira’s friend Ahmad, an economics professor whom Andi thinks of as her real father.

Then Shira receives a telegram from Romei, a Nobel Prize-winning poet. Romei offers Shira the well-paying chance to translate his new work, a Dante-inspired piece dedicated to his wife. The job, however, isn’t as perfect as it seems. Romei’s work is all but untranslatable, with a storyline that bears a resemblance to one of Shira’s few published stories—a discovery that makes her question Romei’s true intent in hiring her.

Part of the fun of Good on Paper is the slow revelation of the mystery behind Romei’s request—which involves not only Shira and her mother, who abandoned her family when Shira was Andi’s age, but also Shira’s friend Benny, a bookstore owner and part-time rabbi known to rollerblade around New York in a cherry-red bodysuit. Don’t be fooled by the breeziness of the opening pages. Good on Paper is a challenging work, with translation serving as a metaphor for the search for another person’s intentions. Cantor’s witty novel is about the quest for the best path and the difficulty in finding it.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The story of an aging poet transplanted from Ireland to America
 as a young man, Thomas Murphy is itself pure poetry. Roger Rosenblatt’s return to fiction after several memoirs, including two moving books dealing with the aftermath of his daughter’s sudden death, is a brief but lovely rumination on one man’s irresistible impulse to savor life’s riches, even as losses mount and the ravages of age take their relentless toll.

Five decades after leaving the tiny island of Inishmaan (population 160) for New York City, Murphy finds himself facing eviction from his Upper West Side apartment and pressure from his daughter to seek medical attention for what she believes are the early stages of dementia. Dismissive of these threats to his independence, he prefers to live by the motto, “You never crash if you go full tilt,” devoting his days to crafting simple poems and sharing his love of verse with a small group of homeless people in a church rec room.

Even Murphy is surprised by the unexpected turn his life takes when a young man he meets in a bar presents him with a bizarre request: to deliver the news to the man’s wife, a blind woman, that her husband suffers from a terminal illness. That chance encounter opens into a tender, if unconventional, love story that Rosenblatt shares with grace and insight.

The novel’s principal appeal lies in the fresh and striking stream-of-consciousness voice of its protagonist. Murphy’s zest for life shines in every anecdote and observation, but it is tempered
by his consciousness of time’s passage, reflected in the deaths
of his wife and best friend and in his vivid memories of the harsh, beautiful world he left behind in Ireland. Rosenblatt has always demonstrated an affection for the play of words on the page, and in Murphy he’s created the perfect character to showcase that facility for language.

Thomas Murphy is an invigorating example of what it means, in the words of its protagonist, to “walk through the landscape of a life.” With a character as distinctive as this clear-eyed poet by our side, it’s a rewarding journey. 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Tessa Hadley is an alchemist, transforming everyday life into the stuff of brilliant fiction. In previous stories and novels, like 2014’s Clever Girl, the British writer has captured the beauty, messiness and irony of family life, especially marriages. Her new novel, The Past, keeps to the domestic sphere, examining the lives of four adult siblings who gather at a country house for the summer.

Ostensibly, the vacation is to decide whether or not to sell the vicarage, the gracefully decaying home where the four were raised by grandparents after their mother’s death from breast cancer. Sisters Harriet, Fran and Alice are also curious about their brother Roland’s third wife and eager to visit with teenage niece Molly. Kasim, the son of Alice’s ex-boyfriend, tags along and also takes an interest in Molly. Meanwhile Fran’s children, Ivy and Arthur, run wild, spy on the young couple and make an unsettling discovery in an abandoned cottage in the woods. Dignified, quiet Harriet, the oldest of the sisters, relishes her private time but soon finds herself responding to one of the house guests with a passion that even she can’t contain. 

There is not a lot of action in The Past. The sisters gossip about their new sister-in-law. They play cards and drink gin, watch the growing flirtation between the two young adults and, together with their brother, wonder how long they can hold on to the vicarage—and if they even want to. But just as sure as mold is growing in the long unused pantry, past arguments and unresolved jealousies and resentments have been quietly building. The present resonates with the secrets the past holds. 

Hadley’s prose is irresistible and gorgeous. Descriptions of the land around the vicarage and cottage ring with a poetic intensity, and she richly evokes the sounds and smells of the outdoors: the bird calls, the wind, the summer rain moving through grasses and trees. Her thoughtful observations regarding the inner world of her characters and the outer landscape of their surroundings make this latest effort a novel of remarkable skill and scope. 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, January 2016

It is impossible to explain fully the beautiful, haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton. Magic? Genius? Certainly much of its power arises from the mesmerizing voice of Lucy Barton, teller of this tale. And much of it comes from the details of the story she slowly unfolds. Another piece of the explanation surely lies in the gaps in Lucy’s story that we readers must bridge with our own empathy and imagination. Still, My Name Is Lucy Barton is much larger and far more resonant than the sum of these parts.

The story begins with Lucy, now a published fiction writer, remembering a time, 20 or more years ago, when she was felled by an undiagnosable disease, a sort of visitation of sickness, and ended up in a New York City hospital for a prolonged stay. She was anguished to be separated from her two young daughters and her somewhat distant husband. Then, her mother, whom Lucy had not spoken to in years, came from Illinois to stay with her at the hospital. Their loving, gossipy conversations evoke conflicting emotions and vivid, if often understated, memories in Lucy about her and her siblings growing up in abject poverty, in a household rife with mental illness and abuse. The lifelong effects of that emotional and economic impoverishment, even for Lucy, the successful sibling, infuse her story in unexpected ways.

Toward the end of the book, as Lucy begins to write about the visit from her mother and her childhood memories, a writing teacher tells her: “People will go after you for combining poverty and abuse. Such a stupid word, ‘abuse,’ such a conventional, stupid word. . . . This is a story about love.”

My Name Is Lucy Barton is indeed about love, or really, the complexity of misshapen familial love. It is also a story of lasting emotional damage and resilience, and a writer’s commitment to the truth. The novel is also full of keen observations about how childhood travels forward into adulthood. Strout, who won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge, has written a profound novel about the human experience that will stay with a reader for a long, long time.

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Paradise City, which opens with a quote from the Guns and Roses song praising the virtues of a place full of possibilities, is a compassionate but upbeat look at four interlocking lives in contemporary London. Though it opens with a grim encounter between a wealthy businessman and a hotel maid, the novel is both thoughtful and witty, unafraid of tackling big subjects (sexual assault, political asylum) but also finding joy in the smallest of human connections.

The story alternates between four perspectives, the aforementioned self-made millionaire Sir Howard Pink and Ugandan political refugee Beatrice Kizza, who is supporting herself as a chambermaid. When Pink assaults Kizza in his hotel room, it sets off a chain of events that not only proves life changing for both of them but also draws in Esme Reade, a young and aspiring journalist desperate to get an interview with Pink. On the outskirts of the city, Carol Hetherington, a quiet widow, uncovers something in her neighbor’s garden while house-sitting that also has unexpected consequences for Pink.

Each character is well crafted and the book is filled with the kind of precise detail that makes the story come alive. Reade is the most engaging, perhaps because she shares the author’s occupation (author Elizabeth Day is an award-winning journalist who has worked for several major British newspapers). Paradise City is most persuasive in its depiction of newspaper politics, especially the jealousies and camaraderie of the newsroom; when Esme describes how it feels when an interview starts to go her way, there is an vibrancy there rooted in personal experience. Day’s work as a journalist also informs the novel’s brisk pace and its grabbed-from-the-headlines plot points.

London is the novel’s silent fifth character, a city that here welcomes those who come to change their life for the better or simply seek new fortunes. Though Paradise City resolves a little too tidily, it is an intelligent, well-written novel of depth and heart.