Two-time Man Booker Prize winner (Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang) Peter Carey’s 13th novel is a darkly satiric tale of cyber activism, modern Australian history and the exhilaration and perils of advocacy journalism.

Facing financial ruin after a six-figure defamation judgment, Sydney journalist Felix Moore, “a socialist and a servant of the truth,” is recruited by an eccentric real estate developer to tell the story of Gaby Baillieux. This young hacker, known as “Angel,” has launched a computer worm that simultaneously freed thousands of prisoners in Australia and the United States. Apart from his need for quick cash, Felix’s willingness to take on the project is fueled by his own political inclinations.

The first third of the novel is narrated in Felix’s lively, cynical voice as he describes how he’s been placed in a “privileged role where I might be both a witness and participant in a new type of warfare where the weapons of individuals could equal those of nation states.” From there, Carey shifts to the third person, as Felix, spirited away to an isolated location, wrestles with the challenge of turning the tape-recorded recollections of two unreliable narrators—Gaby and her mother Celine, an actress and wife of a member of Australia’s Parliament—into a serviceable work.

Carey, who reportedly turned down an offer to ghostwrite the memoir of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, infuses the novel with a distinct political perspective. Through Felix, he describes the events of 1975, when Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was deposed in what Carey suggests was a CIA-led coup provoked by Whitlam’s withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam. In another subplot, he describes the at times comic efforts of Gaby and her lover, Frederic Matovic, to thwart the activities of a chemical manufacturer they believe has introduced dioxin into Melbourne’s water supply.

Felix Moore and the other characters in Amnesia clearly believe we’re living in an age where “the enemy was not one nation state but a cloud of companies, corporations, contractors, statutory bodies whose survival meant the degradation of water, air, soil, life itself.” Even if you disagree, you still can enjoy this intricate and unusual story.

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

How to Be Both, by the British writer Ali Smith, tells two interconnected stories. The first is about Georgina, known as George, a 1960s teenager outside of London grieving the death of her mother and taking her first tentative steps toward love. The other is the story of the 15th-century Italian painter Francesco del Cossa, a historical figure responsible for the remarkable frescos in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy—and about whom very little else is known.

The twist here—and that word is used purposefully—is that, depending on the copy the reader picks up, either George’s or Francesco’s story could be presented first. Though reading one before the other obviously doesn’t change the outcome, it shows that the stories both precede and follow each other, like fibers in a strand of yarn.

The plot and the structure of How to Be Both play with many ideas and symbols, including androgyny, allegory and memory. Though it may sound intimidating, Smith makes the novel accessible and even fun. George is funny and earthy; a credible, albeit very articulate, teen. Francesco’s story is a picaresque masterpiece complete with brothels and a delicious rivalry. But Smith’s talent shines brightest in her tender depiction of the emotions that, like the underpaintings in a fresco, remain hidden but have a powerful impact.

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

The Settlement is a community of about 100 people who live outside of the view of the rest of America, tucked away on a patch of land near Egypt, Maine. This curious collective, the focus of Carolyn Chute’s latest novel, Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves, is not altogether unlike the one inhabited by Chute herself. The author and her husband live off the grid in Parsonfield, Maine, where they run the 2nd Maine Militia and rely on the community around them for sustenance.

In Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves, the story pings from one character to another so often that icons and an appendix help readers keep tabs on who’s who. Those notations are also a helpful reference for those who have read Chute’s previous novel in this planned “four-ojilly,” The School on Heart’s Content Road, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Those who haven’t yet dived in shouldn’t worry, though; in a brief foreword, Chute notes that each of these four books will stand alone, with some characters playing more prominent roles in one story than another.

Ivy Morelli takes center stage here. She is determined to uncover the truth about charges of physical and sexual abose that tipsters have lobbed at Gordon St. Onge, the charismatic heart of the Settlement. The 20-something reporter tails St. Onge with dogged determination, noting his every move as well as details about who he’s with, what he’s wearing, even whether or not his companions are buckled up as she tails them in a car. 

Chute’s odd cadence makes for a memorable read, her stories unfolding like a train of thought. Fans of the author’s previous work will find much to like here, as Chute dives into St. Onge’s mysterious dealings while leaving plenty to ponder in the series’ two forthcoming books.

Gina B. Nahai’s fifth novel, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., is a book full of enchantments and mysteries. The mystery that launches her tale is a contemporary murder: On a morning in June 2013, Neda Raiis, the wife of a Iranian-Jewish exile named Raphael’s Son, reports finding her husband with his throat slit in an idling car at the gate of their Los Angeles mansion. By the time the police arrive, his body has disappeared.

Raphael’s Son, we quickly learn, has cheated almost everyone in the L.A. Iranian-Jewish community in an elaborate Ponzi scheme, with a vengeance beyond anything Bernie Madoff could have conceived. In fact, “he reveled in the harm he had inflicted upon everyone else.” Is he really dead, members of the community wonder, while readers will wonder about the source of his implacable anger.

For insight into Raphael’s Son’s vengeful nature, Nahai carries us to Tehran in 1952, and into the heart of a powerful, wealthy Iranian-Jewish family, the Soleymans. We follow their fates through the reign of the Shah of Iran, the tumultuous Iranian revolution and then into exile.

Nahai populates her story of old Tehran with elements of magical realism. Raphael Soleyman has a heart that glows through his skin after dark, attracting a following of fireflies, nocturnal birds and restless ghosts on the nights he sleepwalks through the city. Elizabeth Soleyman radiates the smell of the sea, which inspires nostalgia and confusion among those around her.

This is irresistible storytelling. No surprise there. Nahai’s second novel, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, was a finalist for the Orange Prize, and her third, Caspian Rain, was an L.A. Times Best Book of the Year. But what really sets The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. apart is how Nahai uses her estimable gifts to offer a nuanced, sometimes satirical portrait of the tight-knit Iranian-Jewish exile community in Los Angeles and to illuminate the historic disruptions to life in Iran that brought them here. It’s a fascinating read.

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

With the publication of The Lay of the Land in 2006, it appeared Richard Ford had written the final chapter in the story of Frank Bascombe, one that began with The Sportswriter and continued with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day. Happily, Ford has given readers one last chance to enjoy his knowing, wry protagonist.

Like each of the novels in the Bascombe trilogy, the four long stories that make up Let Me Be Frank with You are set on the eve of a holiday, in this case Christmas 2012. Sixty-eight-year-old Frank has retired from selling real estate, but in the first story, “I’m Here,” which sets the mostly elegiac tone of the book, he returns to the home he once owned on the New Jersey shore to witness firsthand the devastation (“Nagasaki-by-the-sea”) wrought by Hurricane Sandy.

In the other stories, he has an unsettling encounter with a woman who once lived in the house he and his wife occupy, visits his ex-wife in the “state-of-the-art, staged-care facility” where she’s moved after her diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, and pays a call on a dying friend. Each of these stories is told in Frank’s candid, confiding voice, one Ford has so artfully channeled and kept fresh through the nearly 1,600 pages that comprise the four books.

For all the razor sharpness of his observations, Frank is no misanthrope. He spends some of his time greeting soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and reads novels to the blind. He’s a survivor who’s overcome prostate cancer and the loss of one son in childhood. Though his wit tends toward the acerbic, there’s an undercurrent of gratitude for everything that’s come to him in a life he feels he’s lived about as well as one man can. That’s no small accomplishment, Ford seems to say. Anyone who’s followed that life since it first appeared on the page can only feel a similar gratitude to Ford for having created it.

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

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.