Brief encounters can have as big an impact as a lifelong relationship. Similarly, a short work of fiction can resonate more deeply than longer volumes. That’s the case with Like Family, the elegiac new novella by Paolo Giordano. In this deceptively simple tale of a widowed nanny who, we learn on the first page, has died, Giordano shows us how lives can intersect in profound and unexpected ways.

The unnamed 35-year-old narrator is a physicist who isn’t sure whether his university contract, soon to expire, will be renewed. His wife, Nora, is an interior designer. When Nora is bedridden due to a difficult pregnancy, the couple hires a childless, elderly woman known as Mrs. A. The couple nicknames her Babette because, like the Isak Dinesen character, she prepares large, fancy meals for her employers. After their son, Emanuele, is born, the couple hires Mrs. A to stay on as a nanny and housekeeper. A fastidious woman who, each morning, rewashes the dishes the narrator had washed the night before, she becomes so much a part of their family that she accompanies the family on Emanuele’s first day of school.

After only eight years in the family’s employment, however, Mrs. A calls one morning to say that she can no longer work for them. The reason she cites is that she’s tired. But a subsequent diagnosis reveals the real reason: She has stage four lung cancer. Among the many insults the disease inflicts is that she has to stop attending church because her incessant coughing, amplified by the church’s acoustics, disturbs the other parishioners.

The obvious meaning of the book’s title is that Mrs. A is like a member of the family, just as she thinks of Emanuele as the grandson she and her late husband never had. But the book also asks us to consider what constitutes a family. This poignant work points out that there is no one way to define a family, and that, in any definition, the primary ingredient is the ability to love.

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It takes a bold author to write about an event which is so historically hazy that even the novel’s narrator wonders, “How many people even remember it?”

That’s Karen Olsson’s thirty-something protagonist Helen Atherton, referring to the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.  Helen’s father, Tim, was an ambitious Washington operative who got caught up in the scandal and ultimately resigned, under circumstances that still baffle Helen and her two sisters well into the first decade of the 21st century, when the bulk of this novel is set.  Thankfully, All the Houses is more of a family novel than a political or historical one.  The best scenes are the often awkward, occasionally touching ones between Tim (who is recovering from a heart attack) and Helen, whose efforts at screenwriting in L.A. have flopped, and who finds herself back in D.C.  This puts Helen on a collision course with her older sister Courtney, with whom she has always had a tumultuous relationship.  “The urge to annihilate each other had always been there,” Helen notes, “tamed over the years but never uprooted.”  In fact, the family scenes in All the Houses can be so vivid and charged that much of the political and historical material pales in comparison.

Though she’s written a previous novel called Waterloo, Olsson is primarily a journalist, so much of her prose is straightforward, though there are pleasant flourishes (one aging political player has a “wrinkled face like a face etched on money”) and touching moments, including a scene featuring Helen watching Tim change a tire.  Olsson’s readers will need some tolerance for adult characters who still bicker over their high school years.  Nevertheless, Olsson’s portrait of family tension manages to be unsentimental and unsettling, without venturing into bleakness—even if the book’s title does come from Franz Kafka’s diaries. In the end, if you think of a nation as a kind of family, then one of Helen’s questions certainly resonates far beyond the Athertons: “Was everybody angry in every family?”

Golden Age, the third and final volume of Jane Smiley’s splendid The Last Hundred Years trilogy, opens during a 1987 family reunion at the Langdon family farm in Iowa. Gathered are the surviving children and a number of grandchildren of Walter and Rosanna Langdon, the progenitors and subject of the trilogy’s first volume, Some Luck, which began in 1923. By this point, readers know intimately many of these characters and are familiar with the affections and antagonisms that bind and separate parents and children, aunts and uncles, husband and wives, brothers, sisters and cousins. These ups and downs only proliferate as the story unfolds, until this final episode concludes in 2019. A long-alienated husband and wife find a surprising, loving accommodation late in their marriage, for example, and the love-hate relationship of twin brothers Michael, a high-flying venture capitalist, and Richie, a well-intentioned congressman, goes completely off the rails.

These problematic familial relationships are explored with biting intelligence, great narrative skill, good humor and generosity of spirit. In fact, her humanely realized characters are what make these novels so addictive. But the Langdons never live outside of American history. They are increasingly urban, urbane and politically and socially sophisticated. The family farm is constantly under threat from a trend toward agriculturally destructive but economically advantageous factory farms, and climate change puts arable land in play for international investors. But for Smiley the demise of rural life, of small-town community relationships, has environmental and political consequences. In her final chapters, Smiley offers a warning about America’s future.

As with the previous volumes in the trilogy, Smiley devotes a chapter to each year. With an increasing number of grandchildren and great grandchildren, this requires an astonishing facility for stage management. Smiley makes compelling narrative choices, and Golden Age reverberates with shocks and surprises. So in the end, Smiley’s title for this final volume feels ironic. Looking back over 100 years of Langdon family struggles and recognizing our nostalgia for an imagined American past, a reader may wonder: Has America seen the last of its Golden Age?

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In lesser hands, the story told in Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare would be sentimental or even clichéd. An emotionally needy white woman takes in a tough inner-city girl whose life is transformed when she learns to ride horses at the neighboring stables. Cue the swelling music as the girl and horse ride into the sunset. But Gaitskill, whose novels and short stories have always delved full force into the most uncomfortable of situations, has instead produced a complex and nuanced look at love, loss and limitations. 

Ginger, an unsuccessful artist and former alcoholic, is mourning the death of her mentally ill sister and regretting her decision to remain childless. Ginger convinces her husband, Paul, to be a host family for the Fresh Air Fund, which allows inner-city kids to spend a few weeks in a rural environment. Twelve-year-old Velveteen Vargas from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, arrives at Ginger’s house in upstate New York, where they watch movies, read together and go for bike rides. The real transformation comes, however, when Velvet is introduced to the horses at the stable down the road. She proves to have a natural affinity for animals, especially one ornery mare, Fugly Girl.

The summer weeks turn into years, and the prickly connection between woman and girl grows into a bond that eventually encompasses Paul, Velvet’s mother and her little brother, Dante. Through shifting differences of status, income, ethnicities and needs, relationships are forged and, though the trust that is achieved may only be temporary, the two families are forever altered by the experience. 

Gaitskill and her former husband were a host family for the Fresh Air Fund, and she has explored some of this material in essays such as “Love Lessons” (2004) and “Lost Cat” (2009). The Mare splits the storytelling almost evenly between Ginger and Velvet, with Velvet’s mother and Paul occasionally offering their perspective. This division of the narrative provides a less one-sided look at the way both families are affected by Velvet’s choices. The Mare is a surprisingly tough, yet tender look at a delicate subject, told with fiery emotional honesty.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Paul Murray’s hilarious and surreal third novel is once again set in his home country of Ireland. In the wake of the financial crisis, Dublin is full of half-completed construction projects and Occupy-style protest camps, but the financial sector of the city is set apart, mirroring the separation between the people whose lives financial policy affects and those who set it.

Claude Martingale is one of the latter. A French expat who chose investment banking as a career after majoring in philosophy, Claude doesn’t have much of a life outside work. But when he realizes the mysterious man following him around is a writer purportedly interested in turning Claude’s life into the great Irish novel, Claude suddenly starts to take an interest in the direction of his hitherto aimless narrative. 

And that’s only the beginning of the action in The Mark and the Void, which is part office comedy, part manifesto and part satire—a tricky combination for any writer. At times the book feels the weight, and none of the characters are quite as lovable as those of Murray’s 2010 breakout hit, the transcendent Skippy Dies. Still, they are vivid and surprising. And Murray’s rare talent for combining humor with big ideas is on full display. He draws parallels between financial capitalism and social media: Just as capital is only important for what can be derived from it, your life is only as valuable as the story you can use it to tell; in both cases, what is real is ignored. Yet nearly every page contains at least one laugh-out-loud line. When a coworker says that she and Claude “get on like a house on fire,” he thinks, “I picture the flames, the screaming. ‘Yes,’ I say.” 

The Mark and the Void is the welcome return of one of literature’s most intelligent voices.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, November 2015

David Mitchell’s novel Slade House first came to life as a short story delivered in 140-character bursts on Twitter. That story, “The Right Sort,” is now the first entry in a chilling novel in stories that’s an intriguing companion piece to Mitchell’s 2014 novel, The Bone Clocks, an intricate saga of a war between two groups of time travelers.

Set in an unnamed English factory town “more passed through than stopped at,” the action of Slade House unfolds at precise nine-year intervals on the last Saturday in October, in and around the imposing house that provides the novel’s title. Accessed through a black iron door in a brick wall flanking an impossibly narrow alley, it’s a virtual-reality canvas that becomes the scene for a succession of harrowing set pieces featuring twins Norah and Jonah Grayer, soul vampires compelled to find new victims to fuel their dream of eternal life. 

Though the novel’s narrative structure becomes obvious after the second tale, Mitchell is such an ingenious writer that each encounter with the shape-shifting character of Slade House feels both fresh and consistently spooky. The fate of each victim—whether an adolescent boy, a lustful police officer or a university student exploring the paranormal—is equally disturbing, as we grasp that fate in real time while hoping somehow it can be altered. And in the final story, “Astronauts,” set in 2015, Mitchell demonstrates how skillfully he’s able to maintain a high level of suspense as he simultaneously upends our expectations.

Mitchell’s tales can be enjoyed both by readers who want to decode their sometimes puzzling logic while deconstructing terms like “psychoesoterica” and “psychovoltage,” and those who are content simply to surrender themselves to the power of a scary story. Familiarity with Mitchell’s work is not required to appreciate Slade House, but his fans will delight in references to characters and scenes from earlier novels, which align with his intent to build what he has called an “übernovel” that links his persistent themes. 

“Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by M.C. Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever,” one character muses. That sly description offers an apt summary of a work that almost demands to be read in a single sitting. Just be sure to leave the lights on when you do.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

National Book Award winner Lily Tuck has lived a life that often informs her stories. She was born in Paris, has lived in Thailand, Uruguay and Peru, and now resides in New York City and Maine, providing plenty of fodder for her characters and their adventures. 

That’s perhaps more evident in her latest book, The Double Life of Liliane, than ever before. The semi-autobiographical novel follows the introverted, observant Liliane through some of her most formative years. Following her parents’ divorce, the child lives a life divided between her German-born, movie-maker father, Rudy, who lives in Italy, and her artistic mother, Irene, who has places in Paris and New York.

The Double Life overflows with fraught relationships, with Liliane in many ways pulled between her parents. Irene saw Rudy merely as a means of escape. Rudy, on the other hand, loved Irene and continues to question Liliane about her mother’s welfare long after the divorce.

The novel’s structure is atypical, composed of scenes that provide glimpses into the lives of Liliane, Irene, Rudy and their family rather than a straight narrative. Using photos and documents as well as text, Tuck braids together family history that spans multiple continents and generations. Tales of World Wars, immigration and new marriages are intertwined with smaller moments in a girl’s life, such as schoolwork and friends.

Through its sprawling recollections and period photos and documents from Tuck’s personal collection, she creates an intimate portrait of a life that, much like her own, has spanned continents.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans, leaving behind empty streets, ruined art and a skeleton crew of old-guard residents. The discovery of a dead body in a historic hotel couldn’t come at a worse time for the understaffed, struggling New Orleans police force. The murder reopens the investigation into the decades-old theft of a highly valued European painting, which causes the lives of four people to intersect. 

Johanna owns a studio in the city’s Lower Quarter, where she restores paintings by both local and notable artists. Work represents reinvention to Johanna, who has a dark past and owes her career to Clay Fontenot, a disreputable, wealthy young man from an old-money New Orleans family.

Bartending pays Marion’s bills, but hiring herself out to men with a taste for BDSM comes in handy when cash is tight. It’s in the second role that she meets Clay. She doesn’t allow herself much time for reflection—except on her love of painting, and how it might factor into her future.

Elizam, who goes by Eli for short, is an art thief, fresh out of prison. His skills landed him a job at an art recovery office, where he is assigned the task of finding a missing painting in New Orleans—the same painting tied to the dead body found in the old hotel. More than Eli’s job is on the line should he not recover the painting: They will send him back to jail if he fails.

The characters are all vivid, but the star of the show is New Orleans itself, which author Elise Blackwell (Hunger) brings forth in all its steamy, noir-ish glory. The Lower Quarter is a riveting narrative about crime, art, violence and renewal in a city that embodies all four. 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Howard Frank Mosher’s bailiwick for more than 40 years, and the setting for many of his 12 previous books, both fiction and nonfiction, is Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom—called God’s Kingdom by its earliest settlers. This nickname serves as the title for Mosher’s latest novel, which follows the Kinneson family, whose roots in Vermont go back to Charles Kinneson I, who arrived from the Scottish Isle of Skye in the late 18th century. It’s mostly the story of Jim Kinneson, who turned 14 in 1952, and began to write down the family stories gradually passed down to him.

Some stories Jim has already heard, in bits and pieces; some he only learns from his grandfather over the next few years. The interwoven stories Mosher tells about this tightly knit, resilient family are funny and poignant, joyous and sad. The reader hears about Jim’s black friend Gaetan, who moved to the Kinneson farm from Montreal when the boys were both in high school. A “mathematical savant” who speaks little English, Gaetan is tormented by their bigoted Algebra teacher, with tragic results. We accompany Jim on his first and last hunt for deer. A great story about Ty Cobb catching the local team’s baseball while riding through town on the train—and mailing it back later—is followed by a moving tale of a union supporter at the American Furniture Co. who loses his hand in a ripsaw “accident.”

Each story Mosher tells is infused with the weather, rugged landscape and stoic characters for which he has become famous—and brings the reader closer to the beautiful yet hardscrabble world where people like the Kinnesons, escaped slaves fleeing north, French Canadians and Native Americans all fought to survive. Like Charles Dickens, whose novels Jim loves to read to his mute mother, Jim wants to converse with his readers—to write as if each was his best friend, to whom he could tell “absolutely anything.” This is how Mosher has written this novel, and his readers are rewarded with splendid storytelling.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

For more than 400 years, Shakespeare’s works have been performed throughout the world— retold, reinterpreted and reinvented for each generation. Now, the Hogarth Shakespeare series is giving that opportunity to several of the most acclaimed contemporary novelists of our day. British writer Jeanette Winterson is the first to take on the challenge with The Gap of Time, a refashioning of The Winter’s Tale. Winterson’s own experience as an adopted child gives a special meaning to this story of an abandoned daughter. 

The Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s late plays, tells the story of a king, Leontes, whose jealousy results in the death of his beloved wife and the banishment of his infant daughter, Perdita. Through a series of extraordinary (and coincidental) incidents, the family is reunited—although not before tragic losses lead to hard-won lessons. 

Winterson places the action in London of the late 1990s, a city reeling from one financial crisis after another. Leo is a successful corporate tycoon; Hermione, his wife, a popular singer; and Paulina is Leo’s longtime personal assistant and conscience. Xeno, a close friend of Leo since boarding school, is a game designer. He has been staying with the family, and when Leo begins to imagine there is more than friendship between Xeno and Hermione, his jealousy catches fire, and his behavior turns irrational. 

Shep and his son Clo are the ones to find the abandoned baby Perdita and raise her as family. They run a jazz club in an unnamed region that feels like rural Louisiana. When Perdita meets Zel, Xeno’s estranged son, he is working as a mechanic for the wily Autolycus—one of Shakespeare’s most lovable rogues who shows up here as a used car salesman and expert poker player who inadvertently brings the young lovers together. 

What makes The Gap of Time (the phrase is chosen from the introduction to Act IV and refers to the time between the abandonment and rediscovery of Perdita) so successful, is that Winterson not only cleverly updates the details of the 1610 original but also remains true to the play’s overarching themes of jealousy and revenge, forgiveness and redemption. Winterson has explored her own adoption in fiction (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit) as well as memoir (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?). She has called The Winter’s Tale an important, almost talismanic text. The Gap of Time is true to one of Shakespeare’s most profound plays in part because Winterson brings to it her own personal story of loss and discovery.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Julianna Baggot’s latest novel refuses to be confined to only one genre. Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders is a captivating multigenerational family saga, a love story and a mystery—tinged with a bit of fantasy.

Told in the voices of four women, the story begins with the difficult birth of Harriet Wolf, the matriarch, in a Baltimore suburb in 1900. Born to a fragile, depressed mother, and deemed by the doctor to be “not fit,” Harriet is sent by her father to the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children, where she resides for 13 years. But life has other things in store for Harriet: After a roller-coaster childhood, she becomes a successful author of a series of best-selling books—as well as a mother to a daughter, Eleanor, who provides the novel’s second voice.

Eleanor has been abandoned by her husband and is still haunted by the fatherless state in which she was raised. Her mother’s series of six books have been published, beginning in 1947, to great acclaim—and there’s even a Harriet Wolf Society, established after Harriet’s death.

The final two voices are those of Eleanor’s daughters, and the chapters written in their words illuminate how events in both Eleanor’s and Harriet’s lives have rippled outward into their own. With the discovery of Harriet’s long-hidden seventh book in her beloved series her grandchildren, like the reader, begin to understand their grandmother’s amazing story—one of abandonment, love and lifelong commitment—which binds the three remaining women together.

Baggot’s mesmerizing tale of the resilient ties of motherhood and the bonds between sisters will resonate with a wide variety of readers.

Ron Rash may not have invented the “Appalachian Noir” genre, but he’s certainly perfected it over the past 15 years with modern classics like Serena and The World Made Straight. His new novel, Above the Waterfall, is another contemporary take on the Southern Gothic tradition, featuring a slow-burn mystery that’s light on plot but thick with atmosphere, lyrical prose and a visceral sense of place.

The story alternates between a sheriff and a park ranger in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, whose lives become entwined by a series of escalating incidents involving family inheritances, land disputes and meth labs. The sheriff, Les, a hard-edged widower who craves solitude, is only three weeks away from retiring when a routine house call sets him down a path toward some of the hardest decisions he’s ever had to make. Meanwhile, the park ranger, Becky, tries to lose herself in nature to escape two devastating incidents from her past.  

When someone poisons the local river on property owned by an affluent fishing resort, all the evidence points to a stubborn old homesteader named Gerald Blackwelder, the closest thing Becky has to a father. Les, whose feelings for Becky are clouded by his guilt over the death of his wife, is forced to either arrest Gerald or find out if more dangerous men are involved.

Above the Waterfall harks back to Rash’s first novel, One Foot in Eden, another small-town story told from multiple perspectives, but this time there is no immediate noirish hook. Instead, Rash has crafted the finest prose of his career, whether it’s the brusque, whittled down voice of the sheriff, or the park ranger’s lush poet-speak, which allows Rash to invent words like heatsoak, streamswift, and sunspill. Don’t expect a grim, hardboiled mystery with a high body count. Above the Waterfall is another quiet, haunting ode to the natural beauty of the mountains.

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“The sleep of reason produces monsters.” These words can be found in an etching by Francisco Goya of a young man asleep, slumped over a table as a horde of wide-eyed and shadowy creatures bear down upon him. This nightmarish image is reproduced at the beginning of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (or 1,001 nights, that magical number). But Salman Rushdie’s 13th novel, his first for adults in seven years, is not so tidy as monster against human. This is a fairy tale for the modern era, A Thousand and One Nights for the age of reality TV, The Odyssey in the time of Disney World.

Rushdie’s jinn are mischievous, lascivious creatures, made of “smokeless fire” and generally disinterested in unfortunate human concerns about right and wrong. But the line between the human and jinn worlds is crossed when the jinnia princess Dunia presents herself at the door of the disgraced 12th-century philosopher Ibn Rushd. Dunia has fallen in love with his mind and so bears his many children, descendants now part human and part jinn, all with the distinguishable trait of lobeless ears.

Leaping centuries forward to the present day, a storm strikes New York City and leaves “strangenesses” in its wake: A gardener finds himself floating a few inches above the ground. An abandoned baby marks the corrupt with boils and rotting flesh. A wormhole opens in a failed graphic novelist’s bedroom. A war of the worlds has begun.

Rushdie spins this action-​packed, illusion-filled, madcap wonder of a tale with a wicked, wise fury. It’s a riot of pop culture and humor, with bursts of insight that stop readers dead, only to zip them up again like a jinn flying across the sky. To tell a story about the jinn is to tell a story about ourselves, and this is why we love myth: The contrast of the fantastical allows us to peer at ourselves from a safe distance.

In this boisterous doomsday legend, reality is no longer a given, and what remains is a brilliant, bawdy world where stories are both the knife and the wound.

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.