A Map of Betrayal, the new novel from the PEN/Faulkner-winning author Ha Jin (Waiting, Nanjing Requiem) is a haunting tale of two families and two countries that are linked together by the life of a single spy. When American-born professor of Asian Studies Lillian Shang inherits her father Gary’s journals, she uncovers details of his four-decade career as a spy for Communist China. But when history threatens to repeat itself in the next generation, Lillian must struggle with issues of loyalty and betrayal.

Using the diaries, Lillian follows her father from his early years as a secret agent working for Mao against the Nationalist army to his career as a U.S.-based spy feeding intelligence to China—but the most shocking revelation is that he left a wife and two children behind when he immigrated to the United States in 1950. Visiting the village where he once lived offers Lillian some understanding of her father’s choices and sheds light on the dynamics that shaped her own unhappy childhood. Gary’s first family was never told about his fate, nor did they ever benefit financially from his position. This triggers intense guilt over her own material advantages, and she thrusts herself into the personal lives of her newfound family—only to discover that her nephew, Ben, may be following in his grandfather’s footsteps.

The novel is told in chapters that alternate between Lillian’s present-day pursuit of her father’s story and Gary’s career from 1949 to his death in the late 1980s. Gary’s story, which is actually the more poignant of the two, is unfortunately occasionally rendered in a dense prose that reads like a textbook on American-Sino relations. Lillian’s chapters, however, reflect her aching personal sadness, and the novel closes with a delicate, ironic twist that one associates with the best of Jin’s fiction. A Map of Betrayal is the gripping story of a daughter coming to terms with her family history, set against a backdrop of political change.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, November 2014

Michel Faber’s phenomenal The Book of Strange New Things is primed to become a classic on space, faith and, above all, devotion.

Faber made bestseller and awards lists with his Victorian novel The Crimson Petal and the White, and a film adaptation of an earlier work, Under the Skin, was recently released. In his latest, readers are introduced to Christian minister/reformed addict Peter Leigh. Peter has been selected as one of the very few to travel to the newly named planet Oasis. His mission: to preach the good word to a community of native aliens (Oasans) who are surprisingly desperate to learn from “the book of strange new things” (aka the Bible).

Despite his excitement over this extraordinary opportunity, Peter struggles with having to leave his beloved wife, Bea, back home in London. They are able to communicate only via a form of email known   as The Shoot, and their messages take days to arrive. Peter immediately immerses himself in the Oasans’ community, returning to base only every five days—a timespan that equals weeks on Earth. Each time, he receives new bad news from Bea. Tsunamis have wiped out major islands, national banks have gone under, garbage men are on strike and earthquakes have wiped out small countries. With each day, Bea’s hysteria mounts, along with the public reaction to these traumas.

Peter is faced with a moral quandary: Should he return to Bea, and a potentially doomed planet? Or should he remain with the Oasans, slowly losing himself in their strange world? However, all is not what it appears in his new home, and Faber shines in examining Peter’s conflicting feelings over whether he is best suited to serve God or his wife. Those leery of science fiction should not skip this remarkable, magnetic book full of eloquent meditations on faith, devotion, commitment and humanity.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In December 1976, two days before the Smile Jamaica concert to promote political unity, armed gunmen walked into reggae star Bob Marley’s house at 56 Hope Road in Kingston and began shooting. Marley sustained injuries in his arm and chest; his wife, Rita, was hit as she raced to protect their children; and his manager, Don Taylor, was also injured. In Marlon James’ powerful new novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, the attack is the centerpiece of a blistering commentary on Jamaica in the 1970s and its inextricable links both to Cold War politics and to the drug wars of the following decade.

Marley, here called “The Singer,” may be at the center of the story, but A Brief History of Seven Killings is a tapestry, not a portrait. James created an extensive cast of characters—gang leaders, CIA operatives, rogue agents, girlfriends, drug dealers, reporters and even a ghost or two—to tell this story of a country whose political instability was exploited by American interests, a tale that pulsates and spreads over three decades, traveling from Kingston to New York and back again.

Jamaican gang leaders Papa Lo, the head or “Don” of Copenhagen City, a slum area of Kingston, and his successor and sometime-rival Josey Wales, together with their enforcer, Weeper, dominate illegal activity on the island. When their younger associates ramp up the violence, the gangs are drawn into an even more dangerous world, one with ties to drug trafficking and, ultimately, the crack houses of New York and other American cities.

This is not an easy book. It’s complicated and bloody; the dialogue harsh and often profane. However, James—who won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award for The Book of Night Women, a clear-eyed and often brutal look at slavery in 18th-century Jamaica—is a superb craftsman, managing multiple characters and storylines with an elegance that is almost at odds with the gritty content. Behind the thuggery and carnage lies a belief that deliverance can be achieved through knowledge and self-awareness, which is very much in keeping with Marley’s legacy.

As the singer said in “Redemption Song,” the true cost of political freedom requires us to “emancipate yourself from mental slavery/none but ourselves can free our minds.” In A Brief History, James’ willingness to look squarely at his country’s difficult past makes this an important book—and a remarkable one.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with James about A Brief History of Seven Killings. 

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Anyone who thinks the compact novel of ideas is dead would do well to turn to Canadian writer David Bezmozgis’ second novel, The Betrayers. In scarcely more than 200 pages, this tension-packed story explores themes of betrayal, forgiveness, moral courage and its opposite that are both contemporary and timeless.

The action takes place in the present day, over a period of 24 hours, in the Crimean resort town of Yalta. Baruch Kotler, an Israeli politician, has fled there with his aide and lover Leora after their affair is exposed by his political opponents. But what’s more intriguing than his current embarrassment is his encounter with Chaim Tankilevich, a former friend whose denunciation some four decades earlier had condemned Kotler, a Soviet Jewish dissident, to 13 years in the Gulag. The aged and ailing Tankilevich has enacted a sort of penance for that act in the form of the painful three-hour bus ride he takes each Saturday to attend the slowly dying Jewish Sabbath service in the town of Simferopol.

In a series of emotionally fraught conversations, Bezmozgis skillfully manipulates the tension between the two men and Tankilevich’s wife, Svetlana, embittered by the straitened circumstances in which she and her husband live as a result of his long-ago treachery. Tankilevich offers a plausible, if self-serving, justification for that choice, while Kotler coolly withholds the absolution the couple desperately demands. “I gave, but I was forced,” Tankilevich responds to Kotler’s condemnation. “Everyone was forced. Some nevertheless managed to resist,” replies his former friend. Kotler’s apparent perch atop the moral high ground is compromised by his own infidelity and his response to his son’s conscience-stricken refusal to obey IDF officers’ orders to eject Israeli settlers from their homes.

Bezmozgis refuses to pass judgment on these characters, almost daring us to do so. There are no saints, and perhaps no sinners, in the bleak world he so meticulously creates, only flawed human beings struggling to navigate a moral universe painted here in shades of gray.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Colm Tóibín’s new novel, Nora Webster, never strays from the quiet, deceptive simplicity of its storytelling, and yet this persuasive portrait of a compelling woman blossoms into something greater than the sum of its parts. Set in a small town in County Wexford, Ireland, in the early 1970s, it is the story of a mother navigating the first, tentative days and months of a premature widowhood.

Only in her early 40s, Nora has been left with four children—two daughters away at school and two younger sons still at home—after the untimely death of her beloved husband Maurice. She is a fiercely independent, intelligent and private woman, who pushes against the narrow margins of the nosy, hidebound town where she has lived most of her life. She must make some tough choices, both practical and emotional: whether to sell the family’s beloved cottage; whether to return to work at the suffocating office where she was employed before she married; how best to raise the children, particularly her visibly troubled son, Donal, who has grown asocial and developed a stammer since his father’s death. Suffering no fools gladly, Nora must nonetheless coexist with her parochial neighbors and interfering relatives as she attempts to figure out her next move in a time and culture where women had a prescribed “proper” place.

While she sometimes fails to acknowledge her own sorrow, Nora never wallows in self-pity, and while she may long for the love and protection she had with Maurice, her momentum is forward-facing, both due to her temperament and by necessity. 

On the surface a domestic novel, Nora Webster also touches on the politics of Ireland during the Troubles, as well as the country’s firm, if complicated, relationship with Catholicism. With understated grace, Tóibín—who has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize—has turned a seemingly straightforward story of one woman’s widowhood into a wider exploration of family, community and country.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

This luminous novel is only Robinson’s fourth in a writing career that has spanned nearly as many decades—which makes each one of her works all the more precious.

In Lila, we revisit the Iowa town of Gilead, setting of the eponymous Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and of Home. This time, Robinson tells the story of a young woman who was neglected as a child and rescued by a kind-hearted, fiercely loyal drifter called Doll. Lila grows up traveling with Doll and a down-on-their-luck group who find work where they can along backcountry roads.

Lila is barely surviving when she lands in Gilead, seeking shelter from the rain in a church. She finds herself drawn to the local pastor, a soft-spoken man whom Robinson fans will recognize. But after a lifetime of abandonment, uncertainty and poverty, Lila wrestles with lingering mistrust of the world, and doubts her newfound security as the pastor’s wife and a mother-to-be.

“Even now, thinking of the man who called himself her husband, what if he turned away from her?” Robinson writes. “It would be nothing. What if the child was no child? There would be an evening and a morning. The quiet of the world was terrible to her, like mockery. She had hoped to put an end to these thoughts, but they returned to her, and she returned to them.”

As Lila begins to come to grips with her past, she must decide whether her future is in Gilead. She slowly begins to see what she can offer to her new family and her community, while honoring the transient family of her youth.

In her gorgeous, unadorned prose, Robinson returns to both a place (Gilead) and a theme (keeping faith in a world that can be unbearably harsh and beautiful) that have proven to be so fertile. Lila is a stunning and moving exploration of family and faith, and how to find one’s place in the world.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

After weeks of searching for a pithy way of saying Ben Lerner is the most original young American author working today, here’s what I got: Ben Lerner is the most original young American author working today.

Like his fiction debut, the bildungsroman Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, is erudite, self-referential and daring. It’s a little lighter on the laugh-out-loud humor but deeper on wisdom and those “yes, exactly!” moments that make a book memorable.

The narrator is a 33-year-old Brooklyn author whose first novel has been a great success. If it sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because it was written by a 33-year-old Brooklyn author whose first novel was a great success. Celebrating a hefty six-figure advance for his next book, the narrator ruminates on everything but his success. He has a heart condition that might kill him and a request from his best friend to father her baby. He also tutors a young boy in what feels a lot like a Big Brother program for the literati. Not to mention that the book he is writing, the one he received the hefty advance for, is not the one he has promised the publisher.

10:04 has a complicated structure that asks the reader to put in some work. It contains a book within a book, poems and an entire short story. Each of the five sections could stand alone, although they tie in together nicely, even brilliantly. The book is set mostly in New York City, with all its attendant post 9/11 fuzziness. But Lerner, who has been a Fulbright Scholar and currently teaches at Brooklyn College, portrays the city as an exposed nerve, where the highly creative gorge on the present while looking up in the sky for that other shoe, which is almost sure to present itself in the form of one superstorm—the book opens and closes with hurricanes Irene and Sandy, respectively—or another.

Under that canopy of overarching doom, Lerner’s wonderful story of a nervous young man living a modern literary life resonates far beyond its parts. It is bold, poetic and accomplished, something to savor, a marvel of form and style that will leave the reader thinking of Nabokov, Bellow and Phillip Roth. 

In Saul Bellow's Herzog, the eponymous main character expresses his borderline lunacy by writing letters to everyone, including the IRS. The narrator of Joseph O'Neill's fourth novel, The Dog, expresses his unease by mentally composing emails, replete with emoticons and nested parentheses.

The narrator (hereafter "the dog") washes up in Dubai. Taking solace in pornography and Russian prostitutes, he broods on a nasty breakup with a real and respectable woman, yet he is hypersensitive to the gender wars. He uses the title "Mrs." once, followed by a profuse rationale. He is also hypersensitive to the virtual slave labor making Dubai possible and to his ex-girlfriend's closing arguments.

O'Neill begs comparison with other writers: Geoff Dyer for the genteel sourness, or Richard Ford for the heroic elevation of mediocrity to grandeur.  He is as exhilarating as Bellow, as dark and provocative as Houellebecq, as hedonistic as Dyer and as touching as Ford. But O'Neill is funnier.

The Dog is about a man adrift in a "statelet" that's a mirage. It's about the increasing impossibility of real connection in our connected world, about expiation and escapism and exile. It shows the world as it is.

If O'Neill intends to show that this world is unsustainable, Dubai is the ideal setting, a sea of shifting sand atop a sea of fossil fuels, an air-conditioned panopticon where the dog almost gets jailed for errant Web surfing. Joseph Conrad compared humanity to "travelers in a garish, unrestful hotel." Dubai's "undeclared mission," writes O'Neill, "is to make itself indistinguishable from its airport."

Yet the dog loves his utopian dystopia. Grungy, crumbling New York depresses him.  Compared to Dubai's Burj Khalifa, New York's Freedom Tower seemed "dumb—a meathead tower. It's not even that tall." But to the U.S. Constitution he gives mad props. 

Herzog stopped writing letters, and the dog likewise seems to quiet down.  This, of course, is what writing is often for. In this extraordinary novel, O'Neill has extended the boundaries of what writing can do, even (and perhaps especially) in this digital age. 

Displaying the economical style of his novels Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach, in his 13th novel best-selling author Ian McEwan upends the life of a respected judge with two crises—one personal, one professional—to create a penetrating character study.

Fiona Maye prides herself on being the kind of jurist who “brought reasonableness to hopeless situations” in the Family Proceedings Court of London’s High Court. But what she isn’t prepared to confront on the verge of turning 60 is her husband Jack’s request for permission to engage in an affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter, his self-help remedy for the “slow decline of ardour” in their childless marriage.

With her personal life in turmoil, Fiona is assigned the case of Adam Henry, a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness suffering from leukemia who has declined, on religious grounds, the blood transfusion that may save his life. Beginning with Fiona’s visit to Adam’s hospital room, McEwan fashions a completely plausible relationship between these two characters, using it to explore the demands of faith and to portray a young man groping toward maturity.

Though there’s little inherent drama in the daily work of a judge, McEwan succeeds in bringing Fiona to life as she works with integrity and efficiency to decide, in another case, whether to permit the separation of Siamese twins, knowing that doing so will be a death sentence for one of them. The equally fateful choice she faces in weighing whether to order Adam’s transfusion, like much of her work as a judge of family disputes, inevitably is refracted through the lens of her knowledge that she will never have children of her own.

The novel’s other plot line—the intricate marital dance that ensues after Jack’s stunning announcement—is handled with the same assuredness. A scene in which McEwan describes the tension between husband and wife using the almost imperceptible movement of a coffee cup is a masterpiece of dramatic writing.

Despite its subject matter, The Children Act doesn’t simply capitalize on a controversial issue to build artificial suspense. Instead, the pleasures of this quiet novel flow from McEwan’s keen judgment of human character and his ability to translate it so deftly that through his characters we can see ourselves with new eyes.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Michael Pitre’s unforgettable debut, while not a memoir, is just as brutally honest as one in its depiction of the Iraq War, to which the author was twice deployed before leaving the Marine Corps in 2010. Pitre’s harrowing story centers on three men: two ex-Marines now forging new lives back in the States, and an Iraqi who served as their interpreter and is now trying to gain asylum in this country.

Lt. Pete Donovan was in charge of a Road Repair Platoon, whose daily mission was to fill potholes in the roads crisscrossing Al Anbar Province. The first step was checking them for IEDs: first in a five-meter circle in every direction, then 25 meters—the distance in which anyone on the ground would be killed if an IED exploded.

Lester “Doc” Pleasant was Donovan’s corpsman—the medical guy assigned to the platoon. When he returns to New Orleans after a dishonorable discharge for illegal procurement and use of drugs, Doc still carries his trauma bag with him everywhere . . . and keeps the programs from the memorial services of all his colleagues who died in chronological order in a cigar box, along with his dog tags.

Kateb, nicknamed Dodge by the Marines, was the platoon’s Iraqi interpreter. Immersed in American pop culture from heavy metal bands to Mark Twain, Dodge always carries a paperback copy of Huckleberry Finn in his back pocket—the subject of his thesis for a professor who was killed by insurgents.

In chapters alternating among the voices of these three men and moving back and forth in time, Pitre delves into the horrors they’ve experienced in the war and how they’re barely coping in the present. The novel is full of scenes that the reader will find hard to forget—like Doc frantically avoiding the New Year’s Day fireworks in New Orleans, their sounds like a machine-gun firing range; or Pete choosing to drink alone, since when his tongue loosens, “even the memories that seem funny in my head come out sounding like the summer vacation of a psychopath.”

Pitre’s depiction of the war, both in Iraq and in its reverberations back home, is obviously intensely personal—but at the same time, its messages are universal and timeless. Fives and Twenty-Fives is a highly recommended novel of this controversial and protracted war.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The end of the world might seem like an odd time to care about music and art; why worry about Shakespeare when civilization has collapsed? But in Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, it seems perfectly plausible that a Traveling Symphony would cross the wasteland that exists 20 years after most of the world’s population has died from a flu epidemic. They perform in parking lots, traveling from settlement to settlement and raiding long-abandoned houses for costumes. The musicians care for each other like family and work to hone their craft, because as Mandel writes early in this suspenseful and haunting novel: “What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still so much beauty.”

The narrative moves back and forth in time—before the collapse and after, introducing and reintroducing characters at different moments in their lives. This nonlinear structure contributes to the novel’s quick (and addictive) pace. A Hollywood actor dies during a production of King Lear, then the man who tried to revive him attempts to save himself from the quickly spreading flu. Kirsten, a child actor in Lear, survives the sickness and grows up to join the Traveling Symphony. A dangerous prophet gains power, and a British expat builds a museum of artifacts from the world before the collapse. Somehow, these disparate threads nest and connect, often returning to an exquisite graphic novel that links several of the storylines.

Though apocalyptic societies in literature may seem a bit tired, Station Eleven feels like something special and fresh: a story that occasionally has the adrenaline of The Hunger Games, bolstered by gorgeous sentences and complex characters who mourn for the fallen world, yet find joy in what remains. After playing Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Kirsten reflects on “the state of suspension that always came over her at the end of performances, a sense of having flown very high and landed incompletely, her soul pulling upward out of her chest.” Upon finishing Mandel’s wonderful novel, readers will know the feeling.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Emily St. John Mandel about Station Eleven.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Rebecca Rasmussen (The Bird Sisters) traces the lasting damage of violence to devastating effect in her second novel, Evergreen, a fairy tale-like chronicle of how one moment’s pain can echo through generations.

When gentle, innocent young Eveline follows her German-born husband, Emil, to a homestead in the wilds of Minnesota after their marriage in 1938, she must learn to care for her family without the comforts of town.

Soon after their son, Hux, is born, Emil is called to the bedside of his dying father in Germany. He instructs Eveline to take Hux and return to her parents in town, but Eveline, who has fallen in love with the freedom and beauty of the wilderness, decides to await his return in their primitive cabin. Human threats prove to be greater than those from nature, however, and a violent visit leads to a fateful decision that shapes the family for decades to come.

Rasmussen was born and raised in the Midwest, and her descriptions of the Minnesota wilderness are poetic in their spare beauty. Nature has an almost mystical draw for the characters in Evergreen, most of whom look to it as a refuge rather than something to conquer. Nature can be cruel, but humans—with their messy emotions and ability to harm even those they love—can be even more devastating. It’s far from an uncommon message, but here it’s delivered with sensitivity and without sentimentality.

With its quiet beauty, deep compassion and strong emotional pull, Evergreen cements Rasmussen’s reputation as one of our most talented new writers.

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A notable tourist attraction in Thailand is the bridge “over the River Kwai”—part of the Death Railway built during World War II by the Japanese using the labor of Allied POWs under atrocious conditions. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Australian Richard Flanagan, follows the Australian contributors to this grandiose project, as well as its Japanese administrators, many of whom were destined to become prisoners themselves.

Dorrigo Evans is a hard-drinking and philandering Aussie military doctor. His resemblance to Errol Flynn fails to prevent his capture by the Japanese. (An unintended irony: the Khmer Rouge most likely captured and killed Errol's son, Sean.) Torn from Amy, the love of his life, Evans ministers to fellow POWs suffering from cholera and similar ills. Acclaimed a war hero upon his release, he finds, like many veterans, that life after war seems tepid.

Evans’ foil is Tenji Nakamura, who was part of the Japanese plan to conquer India via rail—dreams which went up in atomic vapor. Nakamura scrapes together a life in the aftermath, all the while fearful of the noose meant for war criminals.

The Death Railway story has already been told several times over (including in a novel that inspired the award-winning film The Bridge Over the River Kwai). So The Narrow Road to the Deep North is light on plot and even historical detail, instead becoming a winding eulogy to Australia's servicemen and the war era—a topic personal to Flanagan since his own father was one of those Australian POWs. It is also literary in a self-referential way. The novel's title is taken from Basho, and Tennyson's "Ulysses" serves as a motif, as does Kipling's "Recessional.” The result can be exhilarating, but it can also trivialize the grim historical reality behind it.

Even so, Flanagan is to be lauded for the empathy he shows to both prisoners and wardens. Their handiwork can be seen to this day in the land then known as Siam. "Lest we forget," as Kipling put it.