There is a scene in Stephanie Kallos’ new novel in which protagonist Charles Marlow is describing all the clichés associated with an archetypal film on autism. It feels like a wink at the reader, as this book contains many of these same clichés. Yet Language Arts takes enough of a fresh approach to its subject to make it a riveting read.

As the title suggests, Marlow is a language arts teacher: He has taught for more than 20 years at a private sixth- through 12th-grade school in the Seattle area. He’s a respected educator who has a strong relationship with his students. 

He is also the recently divorced father of a severely autistic institutionalized son and has just sent his beloved daughter off to college in New York. As he suffers through the malaise of empty-nest syndrome, he polishes off multiple bottles of wine while digging through a pile of dusty items that track his daughter’s childhood. 

But old report cards and tea sets aren’t the only vestiges of the past Marlow finds himself facing. An article in his local paper quickly brings him back to another language arts classroom, where, as a misfit fourth-grader, he endured a traumatic experience that colored his life for years to come. 

Kallos moves back and forth in time, and among characters, in a story that deftly mixes family drama, neuroscience, mystery and an exploration of the dying art of handwriting that is far more intriguing than it might sound. Along with becoming intimately acquainted with Marlow, readers will find themselves inside the minds of his unreachable son; his daughter, whom he enjoys writing long handwritten letters to; and even a dementia patient in his son’s art program.

A twist toward the end of the novel could have varying effects on the reading audience; some may find it fascinating while others may feel manipulated. However, Kallos—whose 2004 debut, Broken for You, became a hit with book clubs—has enough skill as a storyteller to pull it off. And you’re likely to find yourself rereading it at least once to fully absorb what you may have missed the first time around. 

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

Kate Walbert has always been a keen transmitter of women’s voices, from conforming suburban wives in the 1950s to British suffragettes during World War I. In her most recent novel, The Sunken Cathedral, Walbert tunes in to a complex chorus of female characters in contemporary Manhattan, a city recently altered by climate change, tragedy and new wealth.

Marie and Simone met as war brides on a Brooklyn playground after World War II. Now widowed and in their 80s, they remain engaged and adventurous. At Simone’s urging, they join a painting class at the School of Inspired Arts in a rundown Chelsea tenement taught by Sid Morris, another aging New Yorker buffeted by the city’s changes. Marie’s tenant, Elizabeth, tries to make sense of life in a post-9/11 city, but her anxiety isn’t helped by her son’s school, where the weekly disaster preparedness program is called “What If?” Back in class, Marie’s classmate Helen makes detailed paintings of underwater scenes recalling Hurricane Sandy and other vicious storms that threaten the island.

Walbert’s New York is haunted by strange weather and flood zones, by emergency drills at the public schools, and the destruction of local landmarks to make way for luxury condos. But the city and her citizens are resilient as well. The tapestry of voices weave a rich pattern, and the novel is strengthened by Walbert’s use of footnotes, which allow her characters’ thoughts to move freely from the present to the past, uncovering private or previously unshared memories, especially Marie’s traumatic wartime childhood in France and Elizabeth’s haunted recollections of a cousin’s tragic accident.

The Sunken Cathedral is a reference to a piano sonata by Debussy that itself alludes to the mythical story of a cathedral that rises up from the sea. Like Debussy’s impressionistic music, the novel is poetic, full of lyrical imagery and subtle shifts of tone. Ambitious, elegiac and occasionally even funny, The Sunken Cathedral is an emotionally resonant story of people caught in a time of unease and change—and a striking portrait of the way we live now.

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

RELATED CONTENT: Read an interview with Kate Walbert about The Sunken Cathedral.

When an author begins a novel with “And then there was the day”—as Kent Haruf begins Our Souls at Night, a brief, final testament completed shortly before his death last November—you know he knows we know what he’s talking about. This is Holt, Colorado. 

Over three decades, Haruf has given us six novels counting up all of Holt’s days, beginning with The Tie That Binds in 1984. That title is a principle that covers a lot of ground, straight through to this last one, which brings us to the day “when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters.” Addie and Louis are old neighbors, both widowed, children grown and gone, both lonely but used to it. Addie asks Louis if he’d like to sleep with her. Just sleep, that’s all, to keep her company, and maybe talk about things, too. Louis agrees. It becomes an amazing tie, full of unexpected grace, a chance to go back with each other over their ordinary and extraordinary lives. Their pact binds others to them as well—an ancient neighbor, the troubled grandson of a broken home and a sweet dog from the county pound. 

Townsfolk and family members don’t much like the idea of Addie and Louis sleeping together. This happiness, arrived so late, is a scandal to those others. Haruf is our finest observer of the conflict between duty and love, making goodness almost impossible. It’s the little space inside the “almost” that counts the most, though. We are blessed to have such an excellent final book from this great writer. 

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

The Rocks, the second novel by Peter Nichols, has everything you’d hope for in a great beach read: a vivid Mediterranean setting, complicated entanglements, adventures at sea, some hanky-panky and a little heartbreak. But its sunny exterior conceals some sharp observations on human vulnerability and how easily self-preservation can calcify into mere selfishness.

The book begins in 2005 on the Spanish island of Mallorca, at what seems like the end of the story. Gerald and Lulu, both in their 80s, cross paths for the first time in decades. It’s not a happy reunion; we don’t know why, but we know they were married, briefly, 60 years ago. They argue, stumble and then—not 10 pages into the novel—they fall into the sea and drown.

From here, the novel telescopes into the past: 1995, 1966, all the way back to 1948. With each step back, we learn more about who Lulu and Gerald were, what led them to Mallorca and drove them apart, and why there’s such tension now between their two (unrelated) adult children. Each scene reconfigures the previous until at last the whole tragic story emerges. 

Most of the action takes place at The Rocks, Lulu’s seaside hotel, where a group of expats spend their summers. Lulu is a siren: ageless and beautiful, irresistible to men, but diamond-hard and pitiless. Gerald is quiet and kind, a yachtsman and writer who putters around among his olive trees. They’ve each made a life on the island, each remarried and had a child, but they’re worlds apart. The contrast between the way these two approach the paradise they’ve found shapes the whole novel and everyone in it.

Nichols writes with authority and clear affection, especially on anything boat-related. (He has also written a memoir about sailing a wooden boat across the Atlantic.) He can subtly and effectively inhabit multiple voices: a Spanish officer at a port-city jail, the jazz guitarist who plays Sunday nights at the hotel, even the seedy English rake with an appetite for seduction. With its large cast of eccentrics and their ever-shifting relationships, The Rocks feels a bit like the literary equivalent of a good Netflix binge: a guilty pleasure well-crafted enough that you don’t actually have to feel guilty about it.

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

The central characters in The Daylight Marriage, Hannah and Lovell Hall, married young. She wanted stability; He wanted a chance at love. But as the years passed, resentments and unmet desires festered below the surface of their neat facade, creating a rift between the husband and wife that seemed insurmountable.

Always a beauty, Hannah grew up impulsive and spunky, a member of an upper-class family who took luxurious vacations and lived in mansions. Lovell, a climate scientist, was raised squarely in the middle class, in a home where emotions were more reserved and everything was practical. Despite their differences, the two try form a life together: Lovell works at his university job, which provides a distraction from his tenuous home life, and Hannah takes care of their two children, Janine and Ethan, and works a part-time job at a flower shop.

But after Hannah disappears the morning following an explosive argument with Lovell, questions arise not only from the community and the police but from within the family; Janine and Ethan grapple with the absence of their mother while also suspecting their father of involvement. While trying to deal with the intricacies of Hannah’s disappearance, Lovell must also attempt hold his loosely knit family together.

The Daylight Marriage is structured in two sets of chapters that alternate between Hannah’s and Lovell’s respective viewpoints, keeping the pages turning as the stories of love, loss, growth and grief progress.

Heidi Pitlor is a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and published her first novel, The Birthdays, in 2006. She has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007, and lives outside Boston with her husband and twin son and daughter. In The Daylight Marriage, she combines two distinct stories in one—a suspenseful crime narrative and the story of a failing relationship—to form a novel that captures readers from the first page on.

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.