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.

Patrick deWitt’s novels don’t sneak up on you; they’re the kind you love instantly. His latest, Undermajordomo Minor (a follow-up to his Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers), is no exception. From the moment you tumble into its strange world, there is no other world. In that sense, and in its slightly mannered language, it’s like a fairy tale, although one with plenty of room inside for thoroughly modern, adult complications.

The story’s hero is Lucien (Lucy) Minor, a somewhat fussy, frail, proud young lad who’s leaving his village to take a job at a nearby castle, home of the Baron von Aux. Lucy has recently acquired a pipe and enjoys the mental image of himself smoking the pipe, although he doesn’t really know how to. “He adopted the carriage of one sitting in fathomless reflection,” deWitt writes, “though there was in fact no motion in his mind whatsoever.” But Lucy isn’t empty-headed at all; he’s just very self-conscious and lacking in experience of the world. Not for long, though.

Lucy’s direct supervisor at the castle is the majordomo, Mr. Olderglough, who quickly becomes fond of his new underling. Their banter is one of the many pleasures of the book; it’s sweet and brainy and feels genuinely affectionate despite being enjoyably theatrical. There’s also, of course, a love interest: Klara, the daughter of a charming thief Lucy encounters on the train to the castle—though she may be spoken for by the handsome soldier Adolphus, a hero in a confusing war being staged outside the castle grounds. And then there’s the baron himself, a mystery no one explains to Lucy until doing so becomes unavoidable. 

But although there are plenty of mysteries in Undermajordomo Minor, nothing about them is frustrating. DeWitt explains exactly the right amount, in exactly the right tone, beginning to end.

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

Jonathan Franzen is a writer who swings for the fences, an ambition that attracts terabytes of online derision. Hold the derision. Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, is quite simply his best, most textured, most plot-driven and, oddly enough, most optimistic novel to date. 

The book’s epigraph is a line from Goethe’s Faust, uttered by Mephistopheles, the devil to whom Faust sells his soul. One of the questions Franzen, ever the unsettling, ironic, literary provocateur, wants his readers to consider is the complicated masquerade of good and evil: how the most seemingly well-intended actions sometimes arrive at evil results, how seemingly bad actors occasionally engender good, and how sometimes we don’t know the difference.

Purity also raises questions about feminism and male privilege, and—as in Franzen’s previous bestsellers, The Corrections and Freedom—about the emotionally complicated nature of family life. 

A reader is free to avoid thinking about any of these questions, however. There are plenty of sharply drawn characters, fast-moving, seemingly coincidental events, beautifully rendered—often funny and satirical—observations, and excellent sentences to sustain unflagging interest. The narrative moves with astonishing confidence through time and geography, from contemporary Oakland, California, to East Germany before, during and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to Texas and Denver and points in between. There is a murder. There is a missing nuclear warhead. There are conflicts between believers in a freewheeling, no-secrets-allowed Internet and traditional journalists bent on sourcing a story. There are fraught, intimate family dramas and heartrending betrayals. And that’s just for starters. 

As the novel opens, its title character, Purity Tyler, known as Pip, squats in a foreclosed house in West Oakland and works as a telemarketer trying to pay down $130,000 in college debt. Her mother, an aging hippie living in the Santa Cruz Mountains, snatched her away from her father, moved to California and changed their identities when Pip was an infant. Pip, one of those young, worldly innocents, is unbearably close to her mother, walks around with a “ready-to-combust anger” and wants nothing more than to learn who her father is. 

A visiting German anarchist puts Pip in touch with Andreas Wolf, media sensation and founder of an outlawed idealist organization headquartered in a remote paradisaical valley in Bolivia, trying to bring the worst government secrets to light around the world. Wolf offers her an internship to help with the loan and promises computing power to help locate her father. After a flirty email exchange with the charismatic, beguiling Wolf, Pip heads for Bolivia. The plot thickens. And Purity becomes a novel that is impossible to put down—and impossible to stop thinking about once you have put it down.

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

Lauren Groff explored the strengths of community in her first two novels, The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia. In Fates and Furies, she narrows her focus to the ultimate microcosm: a marriage. Told in two parts, first by a husband and then a wife, this unsettling novel looks at the myriad ways even the most devoted of couples keep secrets, betray one another and risk deceiving themselves. 

 Despite the allusions to epic myth and Greek tragedy, Fates and Furies opens like a fairy tale: with a marriage between a prince and princess. Handsome, charismatic Lancelot, known as Lotto, meets the palely beautiful Mathilde in college, and after a brief courtship, they marry. “Fates”—the first half of the novel—tells the story of Lotto’s affluent upbringing in Florida, his failed acting career and years of genteel poverty with Mathilde in their Village apartment. Estranged from his mother and drinking heavily, Lotto finds unexpected success as a playwright. The second half of the novel, aptly named “Furies,” tells Matilde’s considerably grimmer side of the story. From Mathilde’s perspective, Lotto is lazy and self-absorbed, the selfish son of an indulgent yet withholding mother. For Mathilde, family life means keeping Lotto content—but at the cost of holding on to some very closely guarded secrets of her own. What begins as the story of their union unravels into something else altogether. 

In a novel whose title invokes the grand sweep of an epic, there shouldn’t be any surprise when the domestic tale leaps into mythic territory: bouts of hubris, betrayal and thwarted power that spring from the pages of classical tragedies. At times, Groff’s characters, with their selfishness, lust and need for revenge, are more archetypal than living, breathing people. But Mathilde’s rage is as artful as it is destructive, and at its deepest, Fates and Furies suggests that her vengeance is a creative force as carefully wrought as any of Lotto’s dramas. 

 Fates and Furies is an ambitious and sometimes difficult novel about two charismatic people who, thrust out of the comforting nests of their birth families, seek security and solace in one another. Groff’s writing is intelligent, knowing and deliciously sexy. When Groff’s red-hot prose ignites Mathilde’s icy rage, Fates and Furies is something very special indeed.

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

“The one percent” has entered the lexicon to describe those lucky and/or greedy few for whom money is literally no object, recalling Fitzgerald’s adage that they are effectively superhuman. Robert Goolrick’s electric third novel, The Fall of Princes, instead points to Hemingway’s rejoinder: The only thing separating the rich from others is that they have more money. 

The novel is set in the 1980s, when greed was declared good and America was “the most heartless country on the planet.” Rooney is a Wall Street trader who buys and sells “the world before lunch” and then spends his evenings in a delirium of booze, coke and women. He consumes conspicuously and competitively, tones his body to Apollonian heights and seeks the company of the similarly well-heeled. But much like the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, Rooney is empty at the core. A failed artist who thought fulfillment might come instead from wealth, he longs for something simpler: someone to love him, children to dote over. 

He also realizes that he is bisexual at a time when AIDS, still poorly understood, was decimating the gay community in New York. The most passionate parts of the novel concern this scourge and the fear it engendered among the libertines. As Rooney’s substance abuse intensifies, he engages in ever riskier behavior, descending rapidly down the social ladder until a trans streetwalker provides him with something like redemption.

This is no simple clone of The Wolf of Wall Street, despite its brazen celebration of sticking it to the common man. But the novel is not exactly a condemnation of avarice, either. Instead, it is a study in how “a big hoopla of vulgarity and testosterone” conspires to eradicate the better angels of a man’s nature. Rooney is a sheep who dons the wolf’s clothing, only to be devoured by it.

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

A white-hot novel documenting the friendship that arises between two very different women, Veronica is a heady, hallucinatory narrative—another walk on the wild side from a writer who has never shied from tackling potentially contentious topics. Mary Gaitskill’s work (which includes the short story that inspired the 2002 film Secretary) is often characterized by a dark eroticism and probes the raw emotional states of characters on the edge.

Veronica is narrated by a has-been fashion model named Allison whose career peaked during the ’70s, and who, having survived that era of glitter and excess, is now paying the price. Suffering from hepatitis C, Allison, all but broke, lives in California, in a drab quarter of San Rafael. The narrative spans only a single day, but it covers a great deal of ground, moving in and out of the present as the 46-year-old Allison looks back on her life. As a teenage runaway during the 1960s, she ends up in San Francisco, living in a purple rooming house and selling flowers in nightclubs, until she meets Alain, a bigwig in the modeling industry. He takes her as his mistress, and her ascent as a model ensues.

But when, a few years later, Alain betrays her, Allison’s career stalls, and she is forced to work at an ad agency in New York. There, she meets Veronica, an editor with attitude. Outspoken, brash, older by a decade, Veronica is frumpy and unhip, the antithesis of Allison and an improbable ally. Yet the two develop an enduring friendship, and the durability of their bond stands in contrast to the disposability of Allison’s relationships with her fellow models and with various lovers.

Learning that Veronica has AIDS, which she contracted from a promiscuous, bisexual boyfriend, triggers a complex range of emotions in Allison, including feelings of guilt. In the end, she finds in Veronica’s decline a reflection of her own journey, as her looks begin to fade, and she is forced to come to terms with her humanity. Gaitskill’s lively portrayal of the carefree ’70s and affluent ’80s, her superlative powers of description and delicate handling of sensitive topics have resulted in a profound narrative about beauty and mortality, loss and redemption.

A white-hot novel documenting the friendship that arises between two very different women, Veronica is a heady, hallucinatory narrative—another walk on the wild side from a writer who has never shied from tackling potentially contentious topics. Mary Gaitskill’s work (which includes the short story that inspired the 2002 film Secretary) is often characterized by a dark eroticism and probes the raw emotional states of characters on the edge.

Veronica is narrated by a has-been fashion model named Allison whose career peaked during the ’70s, and who, having survived that era of glitter and excess, is now paying the price. Suffering from hepatitis C, Allison, all but broke, lives in California, in a drab quarter of San Rafael. The narrative spans only a single day, but it covers a great deal of ground, moving in and out of the present as the 46-year-old Allison looks back on her life. As a teenage runaway during the 1960s, she ends up in San Francisco, living in a purple rooming house and selling flowers in nightclubs, until she meets Alain, a bigwig in the modeling industry. He takes her as his mistress, and her ascent as a model ensues.

But when, a few years later, Alain betrays her, Allison’s career stalls, and she is forced to work at an ad agency in New York. There, she meets Veronica, an editor with attitude. Outspoken, brash, older by a decade, Veronica is frumpy and unhip, the antithesis of Allison and an improbable ally. Yet the two develop an enduring friendship, and the durability of their bond stands in contrast to the disposability of Allison’s relationships with her fellow models and with various lovers.

Learning that Veronica has AIDS, which she contracted from a promiscuous, bisexual boyfriend, triggers a complex range of emotions in Allison, including feelings of guilt. In the end, she finds in Veronica’s decline a reflection of her own journey, as her looks begin to fade, and she is forced to come to terms with her humanity. Gaitskill’s lively portrayal of the carefree ’70s and affluent ’80s, her superlative powers of description and delicate handling of sensitive topic matter have resulted in a profound narrative about beauty and mortality, loss and redemption.

British novelist Amanda Coe’s The Love She Left Behind is a tart family drama that examines how a selfish act of adultery mars the lives of adult children a generation after its occurrence. In this, her second novel, Coe demonstrates a keen eye for the intricate dynamics of family life and an even sharper ear for the language we use both to conceal and to wound.

Thirty years after what began as a “big love story” in the late 1970s, Patrick Conway’s marriage has ended with the death of his wife, Sara. The playwright, author of a controversial drama about Britain’s Falklands War but unproductive thereafter, consoles himself with alcohol and cigarettes in his crumbling Cornwall homestead. Sara’s children, Nigel, a London lawyer, and Louise, a struggling mother to a sullen teenage daughter, bear the scars of their mother’s choice to abandon them for a life with Patrick. In Nigel’s case it’s a lifelong battle with gastrointestinal problems, while Louise seeks solace in a psychic’s advice.  

Coe flashes back to Nigel and Louise’s lives as teenagers, as they did their best to cope with Sara’s departure. An ill-matched pair, their differences are played out in their disagreement over what will become of Patrick’s house after his death. Whatever chance they had for a normal relationship, Coe suggests, was lost when their mother chose Patrick over them.

Family life is complicated by the presence of Mia, a graduate student who’s writing her thesis on Patrick’s work. Whether her involvement with a man who’s old enough to be her grandfather will develop into something more adds intrigue to the novel’s plot. 

“What happens in the heart simply happens,” wrote poet Ted Hughes, whose observation provides one of the epigraphs for The Love She Left Behind. Whether or not that offhanded explanation for infidelity suffices to ease the pain of children who survive divorce, Coe coolly reminds us that it is a fact of life. 

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

If only Alan Turing had received this much respect while he was alive. One of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence, Turing helped the Allies crack intercepted code messages from Nazi Germany during World War II, but he died in 1954 of an apparent suicide after his conviction for what Britain then called “homosexual offenses.” He was the subject of the 2014 film The Imitation Game and is one of five characters whose “voices” provide the narrative drive in Speak, Louisa Hall’s fascinating cautionary tale of the role artificial intelligence can and should play in our society.

In 2040, Stephen R. Chinn, onetime computer science wunderkind, is in a Texas correctional institution. The inventor of babybots—lifelike dolls—Chinn was imprisoned after the girls who “parented” his creations began to suffer debilitating illnesses. The artificial intelligence program used for the babybots is MARY3, whose memory contains only information gleaned from the book’s other narrators. These include a 17th-century Englishwoman forced into marriage before sailing with her family to America; a Jewish refugee and ponytailed Harvard professor; a paralyzed former babybot owner who confides in MARY3; and Turing, whom we see in letters he wrote to the mother of Christopher Morcom, the schoolmate he had a crush on in the late 1920s.

Speak poses a provocative question: What if artificial intelligence could be used to help people communicate across eras? The result is a book that achieves a tough combination: It’s frightening and highly scientific, yet also poignant. In the memoir he composes from prison, Chinn writes that a computer programmer is the creator of a universe in which he dictates all laws. Speak asks whether a macrocosm devoid of feeling is one worth creating.

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