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.

Someone is setting fire to the houses of Pomeroy, New Hampshire, in Sue Miller’s latest novel, but that’s beside the point. The important thing is that Francesca “Frankie” Rowley has returned from a long sojourn in Africa as an aid worker and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. Besides, the thing that lights her fire is Bud Jacobs, the local newspaper editor whose life is just as up in the air as hers is. The two launch a passionate affair even as everyone else’s summer home is being torched.

But there are other things that concern Frankie, who’s a little, er, burned out from both the futility and tiny, ephemeral triumphs of her work in Africa. She’s moved back in with her parents and neither she nor they know whether the move is permanent. Moreover, her father, who has never been attentive to Frankie, her sister Liz or their mother Sylvia, is sinking into dementia.

Miller’s skill as a writer has always allowed her readers to stick with a story no matter how self-absorbed her characters are. Part of this success is because Miller (Lake Shore Limited, The Senator’s Wife) tends to focus on intelligent women forced to choose between passions and duties that seem irreconcilable. Should Frankie stay near her parents, who need her? Should she stay with Bud? Should she return to Africa, where she can do her best work and where there are no doubt other men waiting?

The Arsonist is a worthy snapshot of the dilemmas faced by certain women of a certain time and how they choose to tackle them.

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

Rebecca Makkai’s The Hundred-Year House is an appealing mixture: part archival mystery, part ghost story, part historical novel, starring a house with as much personality as Manderley or Hill House. Told in reverse chronology, it unfolds as a kind of bookish scavenger hunt, uncovering clues and putting pieces of the fictional puzzle in place.

The house in question is Laurelfield, a historic estate on Chicago’s wealthy North Shore. Built as a private home for the Devohr family, it was briefly an artist’s colony and then a private home once again. Since the story is told from the present to the past, each segment reveals a new facet of the house’s history or an important clue to a character’s identity.

The story begins in 1999, with husband and wife Doug and Zee living in the coach house at Laurelfield, thanks to the generosity of Zee’s mother, Grace, whose family owns the estate. Doug is supposed to be completing a biography of obscure poet Edwin Parfitt, who was a resident of the artist colony at Laurelfield, but he is instead secretly ghostwriting a young adult series. After Zee’s stepfather invites his son and daughter-in-law, Case and Miriam, to move into the coach house with the other young couple, Doug finds himself infatuated with Miriam. When Miriam agrees to help Doug locate the colony archives, they discover long-held secrets that threaten Doug’s marriage and the existence of Laurelfield as the 100-year history of the house and its residents is slowly unfurled.

Both the story and the telling of The Hundred-Year House are more ambitious than Makkai’s acclaimed first novel, The Borrower, but this novel is similarly infused with a respect for literature and literary culture, as well as a wry sense of humor. Though no one character ever knows all the house’s secrets, the reader does, and putting all the facts together is half the fun of this clever and utterly delightful work of fiction.

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

If the dystopian coming-of-age novel has been the inspiration for many a Hollywood blockbuster in recent years, the increasingly ubiquitous genre more closely resembles literary fiction in critically acclaimed author Chris Bohjalian’s Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands.

For readers who discovered Bohjalian after his luminous Midwives became an Oprah’s Book Club selection, the prolific author’s latest novel will not disappoint: He once again reveals an uncanny talent for crafting a young female protagonist who is fatally flawed, but nevertheless immensely likable.

Emily Shepard is a high school student struggling with a typical adolescence—until her comfortable life is torn asunder after a catastrophic meltdown at a Vermont nuclear plant, where her parents are employed. As Armageddon annihilates the once idyllic Northeast Kingdom, Emily’s father, who was once disciplined for drinking on the job, and her mother, who is also renowned for her alcohol-fueled escapades, become scapegoats.

Orphaned and alone, Emily joins the ranks of homeless teens wandering the streets of Burlington, her intelligence and passion for poet Emily Dickinson coexisting warily alongside a tawdry life riddled by drugs and prostitution. Indeed, it is Emily’s inherent integrity and capacity to endure that proves her salvation.

Although Bohjalian’s latest novel is unflinchingly raw in its depiction of homelessness and the devastation of a nuclear meltdown, it never feels preachy or maudlin. Instead, it resonates with a message of hope, truth and the fragility of life.

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

Every one of us has a handful—at least—of Nagging Questions That Seemingly Can’t Be Answered. Some of them are spiritual or existential, some of them concern the future or the past, some of them relate to half-remembered relationships or half-forgotten events. And like loose fillings, they just get in our grill and tantalize us. Our daily ability to cope with the frustration of their existence in some ways defines us, or at least describes us, as adults.

In Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, McSweeney’s founder (and 2012 National Book Award finalist for A Hologram for the King) Dave Eggers breaks out of the blocks at record-setting pace, depositing the reader, his protagonist and a captive astronaut in an abandoned building without even so much as a how-de-do. And then things begin to get strange. Because Thomas, his rookie kidnapper-turned-inquisitor, doesn’t merely have baggage; he’s towing a whole fantasy freight train in the crazy-quilt mass of his misfiring synapses.

At first, Thomas merely wants to probe the mind of an astronaut acquaintance he once considered a hero. But riddles, like potato chips, are addictive, and Thomas can’t content himself to stop with the first one. Without giving away too much of the plot, Thomas actions begin to resemble the plate spinners one used to see at the circus or on “Ed Sullivan,” racing against time and gravity at the ragged edge of composure.

Eggers has written this slender novel entirely in dialogue, and not in the way one is used to seeing it. To wit, this interchange between Thomas and Kev (the astronaut):

—See, this bends my mind. Cornerback on the football team, 4.0. MIT for engineering. Then you speak Urdu and become an astronaut with NASA and now it’s defunded.

—It’s not defunded. The funding is going elsewhere.

—Into little robots. WALL-Es that putter around Mars.

—There’s real value to that.

—Kev, c’mon.

A couple hundred pages of that may seem a bit like a five-mile sprint, but it’s actually a groove fairly easily settled into, and it nimbly underscores the urgency of the circumstances.

Leave it to Eggers to play up the situation’s moral ambiguity as well, much as he did in last year’s The Circle. Virtually every character in the book combines nobility and culpability, and while their grays may not present themselves in 50 shades, at least none of them are painted in black and white.

In terms of pacing, Your Fathers would seemingly advance itself as a terrific beach read, but the plot lends itself to a little overcast. That said, it deserves to be shortlisted for the summer, an outstanding travelling companion for a coast-to-coast flight . . . especially if you’re stuck in a middle seat.

Thane Tierney lives in Los Angeles, and never, ever flies cross-country without at least three books in his carry-on.

James Joyce’s Ulysses is a novel that is both highly celebrated and much hated. Termed “diffuse” and “pretentious” by the likes of Virginia Woolf, the dense book is the subject of much debate within the literary community, with some dismissing it and others embracing it (but very few fully understanding it). Either way, it’s inarguable that Ulysses has made an indelible cultural mark since its publication in 1922. And the release of Maya Lang’s debut novel, The Sixteenth of June, provides more evidence of its lasting influence.

Just as in Ulysses, the main story within The Sixteenth of June takes place over just one day and comprises death, sex, drunkenness and scatology. The three main characters are Leopold and Stephen Portman (brothers named by their parents after the two chief male protagonists in Ulysses) and Nora, Stephen’s best friend and Leopold’s fiancée. Stephen and Leopold come from a family firmly entrenched in the 1 percent, while Nora’s background is modest. Like Leopold’s wife, Molly Bloom, Nora (whom Lang gives the name of Joyce’s real-life wife) is a talented opera singer. But she’s recently abandoned her aspirations as she grieves the death of her mother. Meanwhile, the funeral of Leo and Stephen’s grandmother is the first event bringing the three together on the 16th of June 2004. The second: the centennial Bloomsday bash thrown by Leo and Stephen’s parents, which celebrates the anniversary of the day depicted in Ulysses.

The story is a love triangle of sorts: Stephen, the brooding academic, thinks Nora is too good for Leo, a simple frat-boy type who loves his corporate job and just wants to settle in the suburbs and start breeding. Nora, mourning her mother’s loss in a self-destructive manner, is so numb she doesn’t know what she wants. Much will be revealed by the end of this day, of course, although not much actually happens (another nod to its inspiration).

While Lang’s prose displays real talent, the characters don’t leave a strong impression, and it all feels a bit like an academic exercise rather than a story that can stand strongly on its own. The reader needn’t be familiar with Ulysses to appreciate this book, but recognizing the references would likely make it more entertaining for some.

Following the success of his critically acclaimed debut, The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman returns with an ambitious new novel, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers. Along with a plucky protagonist named Tooly Zylberberg, Rachman whisks readers away on a whirlwind jaunt around the globe, through the waning days of the 20th century and into the dawn of the 21st.

We first meet Tooly in a quiet little town in Wales, where she owns a charming bookshop on the path to bankruptcy. As is soon made clear, Tooly has a past full of secrets she is reluctant to share and, if she is being perfectly honest, portions of which are a bit of mystery even to herself. Her peripatetic childhood is all a bit of a blur; a ragtag band of characters who are little more than strangers—including conmen and Russian bookworms—form the closest thing to a family that she has.

After leaving so many people and places over the years, Tooly is perfectly content to keep her past behind her. But when an old love manages to track her down, Tooly is sucked back into a life filled with people she never thought she would see again. In order to unlock the puzzle of her own life, Tooly embarks on a journey around the world, uncovering long-buried secrets that will bring her to a new understanding of the factors that shaped her.

The Rise & Fall of Great Powers builds up steam slowly—the first half lays the groundwork for the revelations to follow—and readers might initially find the jumps in time and ever-mounting number of questions frustrating and confusing. This simply means, however, that when all the pieces do fall into place, it is all the more satisfying. Rachman has crafted a story in which the quiet moments are just as important as the loud ones and nobody is exactly as he or she first appears. Readers would be wise to approach this book like they would a maze: Getting a little lost along the way is practically guaranteed, but it’s also part of the fun. With The Rise & Fall of Great Powers, Rachman has produced a meaty novel that isn’t afraid to ask big questions or take risks; the result is a story that is both thoughtful and thrilling.

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