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FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Review by Matthew Jackson

Every new Haruki Murakami book is an event, but The City and Its Uncertain Walls has a special importance for longtime readers of the Japanese master. This weighty tome is not just his first novel in six years, but also a return to one of his earliest works: 1985’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. In the book’s afterword, Murakami relates how he reworked the ideas of that early book, reflecting on 40 years of writing life in the process. Without giving too much of this glorious novel away, what emerges from those four decades of thought is a striking, moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways. 

The unnamed narrator of The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a man caught between reality and an alternate world dominated by a strange Town surrounded by an impenetrable wall. When we meet this narrator, he’s reminiscing about both a teenage romance with an odd ending and the Town itself, which he once visited to work in a dark library as a Dream Reader. With the love story from his youth and his time in the Town dominating his mind, he sets out to change his life and find fulfillment working in a new, more conventional library. 

Many things about Murakami’s work are striking, but what stands out most when you dive into this book is his unmatched narrative patience. He does not rely on breakneck pacing to drive you from page to page. Instead, he moves the story forward steadily, with a confidence and wit that keeps you longing to read on. In his trademark assured, graceful prose, Murakami has produced a work of tremendous ambition that on a sentence-by-sentence level feels like sitting down with a friend to hear them tell a very strange story. It’s another masterwork from one of our finest living novelists, and a must-read for Murakami devotees.

Haruki Murakami’s latest masterwork, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, is a moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort Stories

Ruined a Little When We Are Born

Review by Matthew Jackson

The first thing you’ll notice when you open Tara Isabel Zambrano’s Ruined a Little When We Are Born is just how many stories she’s managed to pack into this slim volume. There are more than three dozen of them, some running less than two pages as part of her continued practice of flash fiction, others running to more conventional short fiction lengths, all of them united by common themes of family, femininity and motherhood. 

Rooted in the Indian diaspora, many of the stories in Ruined a Little When We Are Born are centered on rituals of one kind or another, ranging from the mundane to the arcane. In the opening story, “Mother, False,” a girl experiences shocking physical changes upon the death of her mother. In “Shabnam Salamat,” the arrival of her father’s new young bride sparks an awakening in a daughter. In the bewitching “There Are Places That Will Fill You Up,” a girl connects with her long-lost mother in a search for new meaning, with surprising results. And in “Milky-Eyed Orgasm Swallows Me Whole,” a woman has a conversation with the physical manifestation of her sexual climaxes.

Through beautifully constructed sentences that read as much like prayers as they do like prose, Zambrano’s stories slither and grow like unpredictable, invasive vines, creeping inside your brain and refusing to leave. It doesn’t seem to matter whether she gives herself 10 pages or just one; this is an author who understands that the job of fiction is to generate empathy and genuine emotional response in the reader, and who knows how to extract those things with poise and confidence. 

There’s a swagger to this book, a sense of being in gifted hands, and yet there’s also a dramatic vulnerability that comes through, particularly in the stories about growing up, learning what adulthood means or realizing that parents are not superheroes. Whether she’s exploring Indian folklore or introducing an old woman to the strange powers of a dishwasher, Zambrano is always in command, always writing earnestly and vividly. Anyone who enjoys the careful art of the short story will find that in this case, “art” is very much the key word.

Anyone who enjoys the careful art of the short story will find that in Ruined a Little When We Are Born, "art" is very much the key word.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort Stories

The Last Dream

Review by Matthew Jackson

In a career spanning more than five decades, writer and director Pedro Almodóvar has established himself as an endlessly versatile storyteller and a true emotional explorer. Whether he’s examining wrinkles in the nature of human sexuality or probing motherhood in its many forms, Almodóvar always manages to reveal kernels of compelling, often surprising, truth.

Now, in his first work of prose published in English, Almodóvar has turned that same deeply textured, boundless talent to short stories. The Last Dream, like all his work, jumps between genres, subjects and formats, with some stories playing with elements of memoir. In the title story, Almodóvar retells the events of the day his mother died, while in “A Bad Novel” and “Memory of an Empty Day,” he examines his own nature as a writer and an aging person who’s hungry for immersion in a world that’s changing around him. In “Adiós, Volcano,” he pays tribute to the late singer Chavela Vargas, a fixture in many of his films, and in “The Visit” he reveals the groundwork for his film Bad Education.

But the stories aren’t limited to Almodóvar’s own life and career. The more fantastical include “The Life and Death of Miguel,” a story which he tells us was written when he was quite young, in which he examines a Benjamin Button-esque world where life and death happen in reverse. In “Joanna, The Beautiful Madwoman,” he tells the story of a princess driven mad by circumstance. In “Confessions of a Sex Symbol,” he dives into the mind of a porn star, while in “The Mirror Ceremony,” he examines a vampire’s strange conversion.

The sheer depth and breadth of the collection is astonishing, and it’s made more astonishing by the economy of language. A slim volume of just a dozen stories, The Last Dream is light on embellishment or lengthy description. Almodóvar’s prose is lean but evocative, elegant but grounded, and translator Frank Wynne has done a remarkable job rendering it into stylish, beautifully spare English. Almodóvar’s characters, like those in his films, are full of yearning and wonder. Both for fans of great short fiction and for fans of the director, The Last Dream is a must-read.

Renowned director Pedro Almodóvar turns his deeply textured, boundless talent to 12 short stories involving elements of autobiography and fantasy in The Last Dream.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

3 short story collections as brilliant as summer lightning

List by the editors of BookPage
3 short story collections as brilliant as summer lightning.
STARRED REVIEW

3 short story collections as brilliant as summer lightning

With the swiftness of a summer storm, the short stories in these collections electrify and illuminate.
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Fiction

10 contemporary writers (Ali Smith! Tommy Orange!) apply their considerable talents to the signature style of Franz Kafka in this anthology.

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Book jacket image for Beautiful Days by Zach Williams
Fiction

Zach Williams lets each of these 10 short stories unfold at their own quirky pace—like alien insects inching their way out of cocoons.

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Book jacket image for Ninetails by Sally Wen Mao
Fiction

In Sally Wen Mao’s Ninetails, a fox spirit helps Asian women of diverse backgrounds and ages transcend the violence and turbulence of their lives.

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With the swiftness of a summer storm, the short stories in these collections electrify and illuminate.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort Stories

Ninetails

Review by Maya Fleischmann

Myth and folklore intertwine seamlessly with the tumultuous lives of Asian women in this mesmerizing collection of stories.

Each story in Ninetails: Nine Tales reveals the poignant struggles of young Asian women marginalized and scorned, struggling to eke out their identity, follow their heart and break free from political oppression and social expectations. At the heart of these tales of strength and transformation is Ninetails, a fox spirit known by many names—hulijing, huxian, fox demon or fox fairy—who helps women of diverse backgrounds and ages transcend the violence and turbulence of their lives.

The central story, divided into several parts, is called “The Haunting of Angel Island.” Set in the 1900s, against the backdrop of the Angel Island immigration station located in San Francisco Bay, it features Tye, a Chinese interpreter who witnesses the harrowing experiences of women detainees. Other stories include the tale of a silicone love doll who yearns to be human, the plight of a Korean girl bullied in a land foreign to her, and the story of two friends connected by being cheated on by the same man. Unfolding with gripping intensity through author Sally Wen Mao’s vivid depictions of the gritty settings and sobering situations that confront her characters, each premise is made even more powerful by the magical element introduced when a fox spirit manifests to liberate the women from their misery, or inflict retribution for wrongdoings.

Some of the stories in Ninetails end abruptly and can feel a little disjointed; nevertheless, Mao’s compelling depiction of Asian women’s experiences is powerfully unsettling in its authenticity. Through themes of revenge and redemption, these stories illuminate our enduring capacity for resilience.

In Sally Wen Mao’s Ninetails, a fox spirit helps Asian women of diverse backgrounds and ages transcend the violence and turbulence of their lives.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Beautiful Days

Review by Matthew Jackson

There’s a quiet intensity to the way Zach Williams crafts short fiction, like a coiled spring ready to snap, or a snake about to strike. You can sense tension lurking like a camouflaged animal in the careful prose and dreamy strangeness of the worlds Williams builds.

In Beautiful Days, his first collection, Williams delivers intensity on page after page, but it’s how he uses the tension he creates that makes the work so remarkable. In stories that take the mundane to wondrous, frightening and deeply affecting places, Williams keeps finding new ways to remind us of the strangeness of being human, and the many ways our lives can transform in an unexpected instant.

There are no real limits to the subject matter of the 10 tales within this volume. The settings shift from skyscrapers to secluded cabins, seductive bedrooms to the quiet house next door. The characters are parents, roommates, neighbors, co-workers, even mice whose lives hang in the balance of another character’s quest for the right trap. In “Trial Run,” a man visits his office amid a snowstorm, only to find a storm of a different kind waiting inside. In “Red Light,” a sexually adventurous fitness buff finds himself in a particularly mysterious bedroom. And in “Wood Sorrel House,” which might be the most unsettling short story you read in all of 2024, new parents find themselves in a house outside of time, watching in horror as their baby refuses to age even as their own bodies fail.

Many of these stories push their subjects into the realm of the unreal, the supernatural and even the horrific, but genre conventions do not concern Williams any more than neat endings do. What’s most striking about Beautiful Days is not the premises of the stories, but the way in which the author lets them unfold at their own quirky pace, like alien insects inching their way out of cocoons. His prose is precise, witty and full of vivid imagery, dropping us into 10 distinct worlds that might all be part of the same dreamy landscape, or might be individual pocket universes. Either way, we can get lost, because Williams has a gift for marrying tension and humanity that calls to mind John Cheever or Shirley Jackson. That makes Beautiful Days a powerful, unsettling, genuinely thrilling collection, one that singles Williams out as a must-read voice in fiction.

Zach Williams lets each of these 10 short stories unfold at their own quirky pace—like alien insects inching their way out of cocoons.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Conceived as a tribute to Franz Kafka on the 100th anniversary of his death, A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories features short stories by 10 contemporary writers in the idiosyncratic style of the literary genius, a style Merriam-Webster defines as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” Watching writers that include Ali Smith and Tommy Orange apply their considerable talent to this task makes for a mind-bending and consistently enjoyable reading experience.

One of the principal pleasures of this project is the range of subject matter and variety of styles the authors bring to their stories. In “God’s Doorbell,” for example, Naomi Alderman reimagines the biblical account of the Tower of Babel in a fashion that seems especially relevant to our current concerns with the promise and peril of artificial intelligence. Yiyun Li’s “Apostrophe’s Dream” is a whimsical piece presented in the form of a dramatic work featuring squabbling punctuation marks as its characters.

But when one thinks of Kafka’s short stories, what most often surfaces is the image of an individual trapped in a bizarre, inexplicable situation. The volume features several works in that genre, among them Elif Batuman’s “The Board,” where the prospective purchaser of an apartment confronts the baffling commentary of the building’s implacable governing body. In “Headache,” by Leone Ross, the protagonist is drawn against her will into an increasingly problematic health care system.

Screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman has acknowledged Kafka as an early influence, and so it’s fitting that the collection ends with his story, “This Face Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing,” whose enigmatic title comes from an entry in Kafka’s The Blue Octavo Notebooks. In Kaufman’s story, a novelist identified only as “I.” descends, after a disastrous launch event for his latest novel, into an ever more complex and seemingly inescapable literary labyrinth as his identity shape-shifts, blurring the boundary between fact and fiction.

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird is a roller coaster ride that will delight the adventuresome reader, even if the twists and turns of some of its most daring stories may challenge those who enjoy more conventional short fiction. Somewhere, though, it’s easy to imagine Kafka paging through these varied and deeply imagined tales and nodding in admiration.

10 contemporary writers (Ali Smith! Tommy Orange!) apply their considerable talents to the signature style of Franz Kafka in this anthology.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

Shanghailanders

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

It’s 2040 and Leo Yang has just left his wife, Eko, at the Shanghai airport with their two oldest daughters. The girls are returning to school in Boston, but they’re confident travelers. This route isn’t new to them. This time, though, Eko insisted on accompanying them on the journey halfway around the world. Leo can’t understand why. “What was she hiding, then, the true motivation for going away?” he wonders. “She was always dancing around the truth, yet Leo would fish it out, dig it up from deep below.”

In Shanghailanders, debut novelist Juli Min methodically unspools the strands of the Yang family story, beginning with Leo’s questions about Eko. Each family member has their own secrets, moments that define who they’ve become. Geography influences the characters, and Min explores their Pan-Asian identities. Eko is of Japanese descent but was raised in France. Leo is Chinese. As the story expands their backgrounds, their cultural differences and values become visible.

With each chapter, Min shifts to another character’s perspective and moves backward in time. Readers see Leo and Eko’s perspectives, which are the heart of the story. But they also meet the three Yang daughters and tertiary characters important to the family. The ways that the girls view their parents don’t always align with how their parents see themselves. Still, this is really a story about Eko and Leo. The tension in their relationship that’s evident as Eko accompanies her daughters to America, several decades into their marriage, has its roots in the couple’s early days together. 

As she crafts a journey that stretches from 2040 back to 2014, Min shows us the breadth of Leo and Eko’s relationship and many of its defining moments. The chapters of Shanghailanders appear akin to short stories. Each offers a glimpse into a key moment, such as a special understanding between father and daughter, or mom’s overspending tendencies. Taken together, these vignettes become a portrait of a marriage. Min deftly deploys this atypical structure to reveal how many small moments and secrets can shape who a couple—and a family—become. 

As she crafts a journey that stretches from 2040 back to 2014, debut novelist Juli Min reveals how many small moments and secrets can shape who a couple—and a family—become.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary FictionDystopian Fiction

I Cheerfully Refuse

Review by Mariel Fechik

“Here at the beginning it must be said the End was on everyone’s mind,” opens Leif Enger’s fourth novel, I Cheerfully Refuse. In an unspecified near-future, as civilization slowly tips off a cliff’s edge, Rainy and his bookselling wife, Lark, eke out a cautious yet relatively tranquil life in a small community on the shore of Lake Superior. “Quixotes,” Lark calls the pair. “By which she meant not always sensible.”

When Lark brings home her favorite poet’s rare, unpublished manuscript, Kellan, the fugitive who gave her the book, comes with her and becomes their attic boarder. Though Lark and Rainy grow fond of Kellan, they’re uneasy about his past. Then Kellan disappears, heralding a violent sea change in their quiet lives. Kellan had warned of a ruthless pursuer, and when Lark becomes collateral damage in the chase, Rainy’s quixotic existence shatters.

Hounded by grief and the looming shadow of whoever was after Kellan, Rainy boards a tumbledown sailboat and takes to the lake. Soon, he is alone on Lake Superior with minimal sailing knowledge, and only Lark’s beloved manuscript and primal fear for company. He becomes a sort of Great Lakes Odysseus, sailing over a wine-dark sea toward the idea of his wife, and encountering no sea monsters, but instead finding fractious kingdoms and corpses rising from warming waters.

The novel’s ruined world, marked by book burnings, anti-intellectual sentiment, environmental disruption and casual brutality, will feel entirely too plausible for readers. Yet within its dystopian landscape, Enger’s story incorporates fabulism in the most traditional sense, featuring a serpentine quest, a rare and ancient tome, and even a bridge troll. As in the most memorable fables, I Cheerfully Refuse’s fantastical elements heighten the emotional impact of its depiction of violence and grief, elevating the entire narrative.

“I think the sea has no in-between: you get either rage and wayward lightning . . . or such freehanded beauty that time contracts,” Rainy observes early in his journey. Like the turbulent lake, I Cheerfully Refuse is filled with polarities that should contradict but somehow, instead, cohere: hopeless moments infused with light and shocking acts of cruelty depicted through beautiful, memorable prose. Although the struggle to survive leaves room for little else, Rainy still finds delight in simple, ordinary things: the post-storm sun or a ripe tomato. It’s in these moments of earnest wonder that I Cheerfully Refuse is most compelling, like the brief but glorious clearing of a tempestuous sky.

It’s in moments of earnest wonder that Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse is most compelling, like the brief but glorious clearing of a tempestuous sky.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

The Morningside

Review by Michael Magras

Téa Obreht’s satisfyingly unsettling new novel, The Morningside, takes place in the near future, in an East Coast city that resembles New York. Eleven-year-old Silvia and her mother have traveled to Island City after their home was destroyed by flooding. They move into a 100-year-old building called the Morningside, that, like Island City, has seen better days. Silvia and other refuge-seekers have been brought in by the federal Repopulation Program to help revitalize the place.

The building superintendent is Silvia’s Aunt Ena, a woman who is “short, loud, and incredibly ill-practiced at speaking to eleven-year-old nieces.” A marvelous character, Ena has an unfortunate tendency to share details about the farm the family once lived on, details that Silvia’s mother would prefer to keep secret. She also fills Silvia in on Bezi Duras, the mysterious resident of the 33rd floor penthouse. Silvia begins to suspect that Bezi is not just an eccentric painter with an elaborate orchard but also a Vila, a vindictive mountain spirit. Her suspicions grow when light bulbs spontaneously burst and water pipes begin “spurting sulfurously” after a curious Silvia tries to break into Bezi’s apartment.

That’s just the start of the strange dealings. With finely calibrated assurance, Obreht develops a sense of unease that is compounded by an underground radio transmission known as the Drowned City Dispatch, large animals rumored to be “men during the day and dogs at night,” a friend who lures Silvia into nighttime escapades, and the possibility that a killer may be in their midst.

The ending is too neat, but The Morningside soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own. Whether or not they ever face forcible displacement in their life, everyone at some point must confront their past. Obreht addresses this truism with startling freshness in this entertaining work.

Téa Obreht’s latest novel, The Morningside, soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Bird Life

Review by Michael Magras

Grief is a devastating stimulus. The manifestations of mental anguish form the subject of Bird Life, Anna Smaill’s elliptical, poetic follow-up to her Booker Prize-longlisted 2015 debut The Chimes.

The story centers on two very different women, Dinah and Yasuko. Dinah, a New Zealander, is in Tokyo on a work visa to teach English to engineering and science undergraduates. She’s mourning her twin brother, Michael, a promising classical pianist who died under circumstances Smaill leaves vague until late in the book. Shortly after her arrival, Dinah begins seeing Michael everywhere, first in reflections of darkened car windows, then in the apartment she lives in.

Yasuko, an older woman with a college-aged son, Jun, is one of Dinah’s colleagues at the university. Yasuko “came into her powers” at 13 when a cat spoke to her. Soon, trees spoke to her, too, and she could even hear people’s thoughts. Over the years, her abilities abandoned her, but they return when Jun moves out—“I need some space,” he explains in a message—and she hopes to use them to bring him back.

Much of the novel focuses on the friendship that develops between Dinah and Yasuko as they help one another deal with their respective traumas. Particularly memorable are scenes in which Yasuko reconnects with her powers, such as when carp break the surface of a pond and quote the I Ching to her, or when birds land in Yasuko’s cupped hands to offer helpful advice.

Some scenes contain extraneous dialogue and go on too long, but Bird Life is nevertheless an evocative and sensitive depiction of mental distress and the importance of perseverance. Yasuko’s father, a crystallographer, keeps a photo of the first X-ray image of DNA on his pin board because it reminds him “that there is more in the world than I can easily understand” and “that I always need to keep looking.” That’s the key message of this subtle book: Though it might be difficult to detect them during times of hardship, glimmers of hope are always visible if one knows where to look.

Bird Life is an evocative and sensitive depiction of mental distress that argues that, though it might be difficult to detect them during times of hardship, glimmers of hope are always visible if one knows where to look.
FictionSpeculative FictionComing of Age

Notes on Her Color

Review by Laura Sackton

Jennifer Neal’s debut novel is a haunting coming-of-age story, a melodic love letter to the language of music and a fierce, dark, rage-filled upbraiding of patriarchal violence. 

Gabrielle has the ability to change the color of her skin, a quality inherited from her mother, Tallulah. As a child, Gabrielle learns how to shift from her natural brown into vivid reds and blues and golds, as well as how to hide her skin tones from the world when needed. Chillingly, Gabrielle and Tallulah most often make their skin white to appease the family patriarch, a violent, abusive man who demands everything in the house, including his wife and daughter, be whitewashed.

When Gabrielle’s controlling father insists that she take a year off after high school to improve her piano playing and bulk up her resume for college applications, she finds an unexpected source of freedom and solace in her piano teacher, a queer woman named Dominique. Dominique and her mother, Niyala, fill their colorful home with love, music and food—so unlike the cold and fearful house where Gabrielle grew up. As Gabrielle spends more time with them, she slowly begins to face—and heal—her deep old wounds.

Notes on Her Color unfolds almost glacially at first, in a series of meandering scenes—some banal and domestic, others startling in their harsh depictions of violence. A series of events toward the end of the novel heightens the book’s emotional impact, and though the pacing may feel a bit dizzying to some readers, it also captures the often tumultuous whims of adolescence.

Neal’s prose is assured and evocative, and the magic of shifting skin tones enables a fascinating commentary on race, power, invisibility and desire. But where this novel truly shines is in its nuanced exploration of relationships between women. There’s a softness in the way Neal writes about Gabrielle and Dominique, and a hard-edged tenderness to how Dominique and Niyala bicker and tease. Gabrielle and Tallulah’s thorny, muddled relationship is described with prickly honesty: They are haunted by many of the same demons, and yet they struggle to see each other clearly. With small but devastating details, Neal paints a vivid picture of their close bond and, just as gracefully, depicts the ways the world frays it nearly to breaking. 

Notes on Her Color is about familial violence and the complex legacies of generational trauma. It’s also about queer joy and the hard, slow work of liberation. Musicians and artists will likely find it especially compelling—the women in this novel use music as a form of resistance and power—but anyone craving a fresh, inventive take on the bildungsroman should look out for this debut.

Musicians and artists will likely find Jennifer Neal’s novel especially compelling—the female characters use music as a form of resistance and power—but anyone craving a fresh, inventive take on the bildungsroman should read this debut.
FictionSpeculative Fiction

Halcyon

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

With the passing of Ward Just in 2019, the literary world lost a fine writer who was comfortable grappling with the moral dilemmas surrounding the exercise of power and the lives of those who wield it. Journalist and novelist Elliot Ackerman’s fifth novel, Halcyon, suggests that he may be one of the inheritors of Just’s preoccupations. Blending alternative history with science fiction, Ackerman artfully explores several provocative issues that have become flash points in contemporary America.

The year is 2004, and the novel’s narrator, Martin Neumann, is a college history professor whose specialty is the American Civil War. He’s fitfully engaged in work on a book about the role of compromise in American life amid a society whose “grim national mood” he describes as “rage-ennui.” He’s spending his sabbatical ensconced in a comfortable guest cottage on the premises of the titular house in rural Virginia, owned by retired attorney and Washington power player Robert Ableson and his wife, Mary. 

In Ackerman’s imagined America, Al Gore edged out George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election, following Bill Clinton’s resignation over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Although the country still sustained a terrorist attack on 9/11, there was no invasion of Iraq, and Osama bin Laden was killed in December 2001. But most startlingly, the public learned that the Gore administration quietly has been spearheading scientific research into the field of cryoregeneration—bringing humans back from the dead—and one of the participants in the experiment is none other than Martin’s host, Robert.

As he reemerges into the world five years after his death, following a year of social quarantine, Robert quickly becomes embroiled in current controversies, attempting to thwart a drive to remove a Confederate monument from the Gettysburg battlefield and defending a sexual harassment claim filed by one of his former subordinates. His revitalization also sparks a thorny legal dispute about the status of the inheritances received by the heirs of a person who was once dead but now is very much alive. Martin observes these events from the periphery, describing them with a detached but sympathetic curiosity.

Early in the novel, Martin asks what “were the minor events of today that would forever change the trajectory of the future?” Ackerman prefers challenging questions like these over convenient answers. With this choice, he leaves ample room for readers to engage in leaps of imagination as bold as the ones he’s undertaken. Anyone who accepts that invitation will come away from this ingenious story with fresh ideas of what past, present and future truly mean.

Elliot Ackerman prefers challenging questions over convenient answers, leaving ample room for readers to engage in leaps of imagination as bold as the ones he’s undertaken.

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