Bosnian-born author Aleksandar Hemon’s fiction has always been a sobering, sometimes bleak look at the lives of immigrants and exiles in Chicago who are not unlike the writer himself (see The Lazarus Project and Love and Obstacles). But in a dramatic change of pace and tone, his new novel, The Making of Zombie Wars, is an eccentric comedy, albeit one with the same level of subtlety and resonance we’re accustomed to from Hemon, a MacArthur “genius grant” winner.

An aspiring writer from an affluent Chicago suburb who never finishes anything he starts, Joshua Levin has never had to suffer much. His life is “a warm blanket,” in contrast to the lives of the immigrants he teaches as an ESL instructor, and his creative endeavors have been as futile and disheartening as the Cubs at nearby Wrigley Field. That is, until Joshua comes up with an idea for a script called Zombie Wars that could be his big break, and the sad but beautiful Bosnian woman in his class, Ana, starts to seduce him.

Of course, Ana is married, and Joshua just moved in with his girlfriend. As Ana turns his life upside down, Joshua finally has some real-life drama to funnel into his writing. Excerpts from Joshua’s script draw parallels between a zombie apocalypse and the culture-cannibalizing effects of war and exile, be it in Hemon’s native Bosnia or in Iraq, which U.S. forces have only just begun to invade when the novel opens in 2003.

As the story oscillates between hysterical and heartbreaking, Hemon once again renders the city of Chicago authentically, forgoing the whitewashed suburbs of John Hughes movies and invoking the city’s social and cultural realities as faithfully as Alex Kotlowitz. The wit and intelligence of The Making of Zombie Wars should please Hemon fans and entice new readers.

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

The latest work from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison is puzzling until you realize that it’s actually a fairy tale. How else to describe a story about a woman who is so bereft without the man in her life that the lack of him causes her to regress back to childhood—literally. Bride, the book’s beautiful, very young cosmetics tycoon, slowly loses all the physical signifiers of womanhood. Even the holes in her pierced ears close up.

Also strange are the circumstances of Bride’s birth. Named Lula Ann Bridewell, she is born a dark-skinned baby to parents who take refuge in their light skin and “good” hair. The sight of Lula Ann repels them to the point that her mother doesn’t want to touch her and insists she call her “Sweetness” instead of “Mother.” Lula Ann’s father eventually abandons his wife and child altogether. The reader believes that Sweetness’ hard-heartedness comes not only from her internalized racism but also from a desire to protect her daughter. 

Sweetness also mentions that her husband was a porter and that Lula Ann was born in the ’90s. At first, this reviewer thought it was the 1890s, but no, Lula Ann was born in the 1990s, which makes her parents’ attitude even more disturbing. Do light-skinned African American parents still reject their dark-skinned children? And who names a child born in 1991 or so “Lula Ann”?

But again, this slim and accessible book is a fairy tale, and fairy tales are timeless. It’s not so much about race but about wounded children, not to mention how pain is passed along—and how pain can be healed, at least partially. Bride has been hurt by her mother’s rejection and has hurt others in return; her lover has been forever scarred by the murder of an adored older brother.

Though this will likely be considered a minor work from one of our greatest novelists, God Help the Child is gracefully written and full of surprises.

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

A beautifully written tale that is a blend of mystery, ghost story and very real human tragedy, The World Before Us is a story about what is missing—and also about what is always present.

In her U.S. debut, Canadian award-winning poet and author Aislinn Hunter dips into the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries to tell the story of a London archivist who is entangled in her own past as well as a much more distant one.

In the summer of 1991, 15-year-old Jane Standen was babysitting 5-year-old Lily during an outing with Lily’s father, William, a researcher studying a Victorian-era plant hunter. The gardens they were visiting were close to a long-abandoned asylum, the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics. One moment Lily was there, laughing and playing along the trail while Jane’s thoughts were preoccupied by her dizzying adolescent crush on William. The next moment, Lily was gone—forever.

Lily’s disappearance is never solved, and Jane moves forward in a fog of guilt, aborting a career as a cellist before settling on archiving, a fitting path for someone unable to move beyond one aspect of her own history.

While working with historical documents at the Chester Museum, Jane becomes obsessed with another missing-persons tale. A young woman left the grounds of Whitmore with two men one summer day in 1887—and also seemed to permanently disappear.

As Jane researches this case and continues to grapple with the fallout from her own devastating experience, the reader meets a stream of fascinating characters from three centuries, whose far-reaching and long-spanning connections remind us of the history we breathe in each day as we go about our lives.

The reader is also treated to an original mix of narrators—a ghostly Greek chorus of sorts, made up of long-gone folks who are also obsessed with their own pasts and present identities.

This is a special book that starts out a bit slowly but quickly becomes tremendously absorbing. 

Admirers of Norwegian Per Petterson’s melancholy, atmospheric novels like Out Stealing Horses and To Siberia will welcome this story of two boyhood friends from a small town outside Oslo and the unexpected paths their lives trace after those early days. Featuring the same deep attention to character and introspective style of his earlier works, I Refuse confirms Petterson’s status as a standout among contemporary novelists.

The action of I Refuse encompasses a broad swath of time, a technique Petterson characteristically has employed to explore how long-ago events resonate in the present. Early on a September morning in 2006, Tommy Berggren encounters his friend Jim, whom he hasn’t seen for more than 35 years, fishing off an Oslo bridge. From that chance meeting the novel flashes back four decades to the town of Mørk, where Tommy and his three sisters live with their abusive father, abandoned by his wife. While Tommy overcomes his troubled childhood to become a successful, if emotionally remote, businessman, Jim, a self-professed socialist, struggles with panic attacks that reduce him to depending on disability payments.

Petterson relies on a variety of narrative voices, both first and third person, to tell this story. He’s especially effective depicting the quotidian moments of boyhood, and in illuminating the relationship between teenagers Tommy and Jim, two boys “so close to each other that there might be some current between them, an electric arc that made one feel what the other felt.”

Few writers can surpass Petterson’s skill in employing a narrative technique that’s distinctive for its confidence, and his readers will relish the opportunity to fill in gaps from what’s only hinted at on the page. Couple that with the psychological acuity of his storytelling and it’s clear why his novels, for all their surface bleakness, are so deeply satisfying.

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

The men of the American Wild West called it the “shining times,” when the law held no sway over any place beyond the Mississippi. The new novel from T.C. Boyle takes this tradition of renegades and focuses on the violence.

Twenty-five-year-old Adam worships one of these survivalist mountain men, even renaming himself after him: Colter. He’s manic, raging and growing his own stash of opium poppies, and he easily falls in with 40-something Sara, a hardcore member of an extremist anti-government movement. Together they are citizen soldiers, making war (not love) and defiantly, desperately searching for something to burn down—and burn they do. Adam is also the son of ex-Marine Sten, the epitome of claustrophobic rage and frustration, who kills someone with his bare hands while on vacation in Costa Rica.

As these three stubborn minds draw together like fire and kindling, violence becomes more than an inherited trait within one family but rather a syndrome of a nation built on revolution and stoicism, distorted by fear and hysteria. It may be a stroke of genius that the characters themselves are maddening in their own right, leaving readers with a pounding pulse not only from suspense but from infuriation.

The bestselling, unbelievably prolific Boyle has described The Harder They Fall as a counterpoint to his historical novel San Miguel (2012), which unfolded through the perspectives of three women who sought refuge and sanctuary on an island off the coast of California. San Miguel was a departure for Boyle, and now the pendulum swings back to high-adrenaline zaniness and pertinacious, destructive misfits. Individualism remains central, but unlike San Miguel, it’s far from contemplative. It is a juggernaut, twisted to its breaking point.

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

Pity the quiet novel about family life. In an era when novelists are taught to write killer openings and the line between literary and genre fiction is increasingly blurred, it seems as if there’s no room for a contemplative novel that finds drama in quiet moments. Fortunately, such books are still being published, and one of the better examples is The Children’s Crusade, the new novel by Ann Packer (The Dive from Clausen’s Pier).

The story begins in the 1950s, when Michigan native Bill Blair completes a residency in pediatrics and buys 3.1 acres of undeveloped land in what will eventually be known as Silicon Valley. He marries Penny Greenway, who, at first, takes great pride in her role as a housewife. But well before their four children are adults, Penny has converted the shed on the property into an art studio and withdrawn from the rest of the family. When 38-year-old James, the youngest child, returns to California in 2006 from his current home in Eugene, Oregon, he tells his older siblings—Robert, a physician; Rebecca, a psychiatrist; and Ryan, a teacher—all of whom still live on or near the homestead, that he needs money and wants to sell the house. The novel alternates between past and present and among each sibling’s perspective to create a compelling portrait of complicated family relationships.

Packer’s strength is her ability to see meaning in small gestures, to recognize that “Are you okay?” is, in many marriages, a loaded question. Her descriptions are beautiful; she imagines the sky as being the color of a glass of water into which one has dipped a calligraphy pen. Some scenes go on too long, but the book is always perceptive about love and relationships and treats its nuanced characters with sympathy. When Robert’s boy Sammy is born, Bill gives his son advice: “Enjoy him.” The Children’s Crusade is about, among other topics, whether we enjoy our children, even when they grow up into adults whose company we might not otherwise accept. That’s the kind of insight you get in a quiet novel.

Michael Magras is a writer living in southern Maine and a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

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

The first thing that is immediately apparent about Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, A Little Life, is that it has been incorrectly named: There is nothing little about this novel—not the lives depicted within it or the size of its author’s ambitions and talents. And not the page count, either. It is a hulking doorstop of a book, perfect for the reader who likes to burrow into a book for weeks at a time.

If such an expansive novel must be reduced to an overly simplified summary, A Little Life charts the lives and friendships of a group of four men—JB, Malcolm, Willem and Jude—who meet their freshman year of college and then orbit one another for decades thereafter. It is a novel that delves deep into all the moments that make up a life, from the quiet to the loud, the glorious and the shameful, exploring the things that make a person who he is while simultaneously breaking him as well. Monumentally epic in its detail and scope, it is a book about friendship, courage, redemption, aging, desperation, family, love.

Written in luminous prose that is becoming Yanagihara’s hallmark, A Little Life is a gorgeous book that is, at times, shockingly horrific in its subject matter. In Yanagihara’s provocative debut, The People in the Trees, she took readers on a scandalously dark and painful journey, but her first novel seems rather tame when compared to the torments explored here. There are moments of lightness and beauty, yes, but do not go into this book expecting it to do anything other than break your heart—albeit in the most exquisite fashion. This book is not for every reader, but if you can withstand the maelstrom that is A Little Life, you will be rewarded with a thrillingly good read.   

RELATED CONTENT: Read our interview with Hanya Yanagihara about A Little Life.

To describe Jill Ciment’s latest novel as the story of a supermold that colonizes a Brooklyn neighborhood and threatens to infest the entire city doesn’t even come close to doing it justice—though it’s factually accurate. Dressed in the guise of a thriller, Act of God is really a keenly intelligent story about the tangled bonds of sisterly love and the power of repentance and forgiveness.

Sixty-four-year-old twin sisters Edith and Kat Glasser share a rent-controlled apartment in a row house owned by Vida Cebu, an accomplished Shakespearean actress best known for her role in a commercial for a female sexual enhancement pill. When Edith, a retired law firm librarian, tries to enlist her landlord’s help in dealing with the phosphorescent mushroom-like growth that has sprouted in the apartment, her entreaties are ignored. Evacuation is followed by incineration, as the HAZMAT teams rush to contain the outbreak.

As her characters consider the insurance and landlord-tenant issues resulting from a conclusion that the alien growth is an act of God (“When did State Farm become religious?” Vida asks her insurance agent), Ciment orchestrates an increasingly complicated plot with consummate skill. There’s an unemployed Russian nanny who calls herself Ashley and who helps herself to rent-free accommodations in Vida’s building and elsewhere; a rekindled love affair between Kat and Frank, the building superintendent; and the existential crisis of Gladys, the Glasser sisters’ next-door-neighbor, who must figure out where she can relocate with her 17 cats in tow. It’s New York City at its most manic.

But the novel acquires real moral weight when the otherwise feckless Kat demands a penance from Vida that has nothing to do with financial compensation for the injury she’s inflicted on others by her casual indifference. Kat seeks “restorative justice”: nothing less than Vida’s acceptance of responsibility and an apology for her callousness. Watching Vida wrestle with this deceptively simple request makes us understand how hard it is to say the words, “I’m sorry.”

In fewer than 200 pages, Ciment has pulled off an admirable literary feat, creating a novel that moves at the speed of light, all the while urging us to pause and look inward.

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

Each new book by Booker Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) is, on the surface at least, vastly different from those that have come before. The Buried Giant—his first novel in almost 10 years—is no exception. This fable-like narrative, set in England just after the mythic reign of Arthur, chronicles the adventures of an elderly couple as they journey across a wild and rugged landscape. Old and forgetful, but still endearingly in love, Axl and Beatrice have been cast to the margins of their settlement, not even allowed candles for fear that they may do themselves harm. So, they decide to set out for their son’s village, which they believe they can reach with a few days’ travel. But the landscape abounds with human hostility and ignorance, as well as the shadowy possibility of ogres and other mythical beasts.

The couple, who are Britons and Christians, are joined mid-journey by a young Saxon knight, Wistan, as well as a boy, Edwin, whom the knight has rescued from the hands of superstitious villagers. This unlikely quartet meets an aging Sir Gawain, the last survivor of Arthur’s round table, in the woods, and makes its way to a fortress-turned-monastery.

Despite the swords and monsters, this is not the sex and violence fictional world of George R.R. Martin. Ishiguro has crafted a haunting allegory, rife with symbols and archetypes. Its deceptively simple narrative unfolds with the ease of a timeless fairy tale, and as with all classic fairy tales it works as a universal parable. Like much of Ishiguro’s work, The Buried Giant is about the clouds of memory, our human imperfections and our unresolved pasts. It is a welcome return by one of our most subtle, thought-provoking novelists.

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

It’s a favorite trick among literary novelists: use a classic work of literature as a launching pad for an investigation into favored themes. Jean Rhys did it with Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel of sorts to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. J.M. Coetzee has done it twice, first in Foe, in which he reimagined Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of a woman, and then, more daringly, in The Childhood of Jesus. Now essayist and playwright Caryl Phillips takes the work of a different Brontë—Emily—as the inspiration for his latest novel, The Lost Child.

In 1957, 20-year-old Oxford undergraduate Monica Johnson is set to give up her studies, much to her geography teacher father’s disappointment. She plans to marry Julius Wilson, a divorced grad student 10 years her senior, and follow him to the south coast of England. She does, and he gets a job at a polytechnic and founds a political organization devoted to anti-colonialism in his native West Indies.

Phillips intercuts the story of Monica, her two sons and her ensuing madness with scenes from Emily Brontë’s life. We see Brontë sick in bed, worrying along with the rest of the family about the fate of her brother, Branwell, and retreating into her imagination to work on a novel about a boy on the moors.

Despite the obvious parallels to Wuthering Heights—Monica is clearly meant to suggest a 20th-century Cathy—Phillips is too smart to simply put new clay on the same armature. He goes beyond the tale of Heathcliff and Cathy to create a biting commentary on empire and the vulnerability of family life. This is a devastating novel from one of our best writers.

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

Halfway through Rachel Basch’s third novel, The Listener, the reader gets the feeling that the title is ironic. Malcolm Dowd is a psychotherapist at the college in his town. His job is to listen; no doubt his skill at listening has saved the sanity or even the lives of the sad people who unburden themselves in his office. But when it comes to his own loved ones, Malcolm Dowd is about as deaf as a stump.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the loved ones Dowd listens to the least are the women in his life. These include his daughters Leah and Susannah; Cara, a musician who’s his off-and-on lover; and Jane, the betrayed wife of his feckless colleague. In Dowd, Basch seems to be describing the legions of men who feel astonished, annoyed and even betrayed when the women in their lives have problems, anxieties and secrets that don’t involve the men in their lives. Plus, Dowd is certain that he knows what’s best for these females—he’s a man, after all, as well as a shrink.

Fortunately for Dowd, a type of salvation might be found in his new patient, a college kid named Noah. Noah’s problems are more complex than Dowd is used to handling, and this alone is a source of fascination for the older man. Noah’s troubles force Dowd to truly attend to him. Also, the talented and exquisitely sensitive Noah is a great listener himself, especially to the women in his life: like his eccentric, if loving, mother and a Titian-haired friend who’s as conflicted as he is.

Basch is good at plumbing the preoccupations of self-obsessed middle-aged folks and quasi-incestuous New England college towns. But her take on the emotional dislocations of the millennial, not just Noah and his friends and foes, but Dowd’s somewhat embittered, somewhat spoiled daughters, is wonderfully excruciating. Clearly, this is an author who remembers her own late adolescence all too well. The result is not just writing that’s good, but writing that’s brave.

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

Reif Larsen waits 200 pages before betraying his literary lineage by using the phrase “gravity’s rainbow.” For in his sprawling, pyrotechnic second novel, I Am Radar, one is never far from Pynchon’s masterpiece, that once-groundbreaking combination of adolescent hilarity and theoretical physics. The authors share a soaring erudition and ambition—evidenced by the length and ostentation of their books. But where Pynchon’s main theme might be a paranoiac fear of annihilation and conspiracy, Larsen’s seems to be an affirmation of the pathetic randomness of life. It’s telling that his previous book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, was made into a film by the director of Amélie, and his new release resembles the joyful, madcap creations of Wes Anderson.

The “Radar” of the title is Radar Radmanovic, an American boy with Serbian roots. He was born with black skin even though his parents are white, and his mother’s desire that Radar be “normal” leads to their entanglement with an odd group of Norwegians who claim the ability to change skin color by electrochemical means. The Norwegians double as performance artists, offering shows in places as far-flung as Yugoslavia, Cambodia and the Congo, all recently embroiled in appalling wars.

This is maximalism of the maximum order, so the novel also includes dissertations on Nikola Tesla, Morse code, electromagnetic pulses and, perhaps inevitably, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s hapless cat. I Am Radar aims for nothing less than to encapsulate our “age of extremes” in fictional form, and Larsen rises to the challenge he has set. His prose is angelic, and while the effort to touch on everything threatens to make the book more noise than signal, it’s precisely the noise of modernity that novelists like Larsen are determined to convey. It’s an exhilarating ride.

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