“Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.” So says war correspondent Michael Herr on the persistent reality of a war curiously prone to re-examination. In The Lotus and the Storm, by Vietnamese-American author Lan Cao, this revisiting takes the form of a dialogue of sorts between a daughter and a father, lotuses swept to America’s shores by the storm of the American intervention.

The father, Mr. Minh, is a soldier in the South Vietnamese army. At first appreciative of the assistance the Americans provide, he is disillusioned by the U.S.-backed assassination of the republic’s leader Diem. Minh doesn’t switch sides, but when the Americans retreat in ignominy, his sense of betrayal becomes complete.

Mai, the daughter, becomes enamored at a young age with a typically green and generous American, who appears to be killed in an attack that also slays her sister. Much like the author, Mai nevertheless attains with great ambivalence a portion of the American Dream.

Now that most Americans view the war as a mistake if not an atrocity, the author is keen to remind us that, whatever the Americans’ broader strategic goals, saving South Vietnam was to its loyal citizens a dire matter indeed. Moreover, the civil strife didn’t end when the war did, with Vietnamese-Americans on both sides still holding grudges and nursing resentments. But this is also a novel about reconciliation, and about that generation of Vietnamese for whom the future supersedes the past.

This isn’t the best novel about the conflict—that honor goes to Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War. Cao’s dense language and her seeming indecision between embittered history and sentimentality belie the novel’s therapeutic character. But, like Cao’s acclaimed debut, Monkey Bridge, it is an impassioned and powerful attempt to understand a chapter of history that, as Herr says, we’ve all in a sense inhabited.

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

Set against the colorful backdrop of the Virgin Islands from 1916 to the 1970s, Land of Love and Drowning weaves an intricate tale of the legacy of an island family as it grapples with love, magic and death over more than six decades. A heartbroken patriarch purposefully sinks his ship into the Caribbean, leaving two daughters and their half-brother to make their own way, each in possession of a particular magic and unusual beauty.

Rumors of witchcraft, adultery and incest surround the orphaned Bradshaw children, and as the siblings set out to form their own future on the steadily changing island, they discover family is important, but also inescapable. The islands are transferred from Danish to American rule, and tourism becomes king; however, just as St. Thomas is coming into the modern world, a fearsome hurricane reveals forgotten priorities.

Tiphanie Yanique is a native of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and the author of the story collection How to Escape from a Leper Colony. Alternately told in neat, concise speech and fiery Caribbean dialect, Land of Love and Drowning is well researched—much of Yanique’s family history is woven into the storyline—and the novel’s careful structure keeps the reader from getting lost amid the historical context. Yanique’s vivid writing, echoing Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez, builds a whole world within its language and cadence. Exhilarating, fierce and effortless, Land of Love and Drowning is the imaginative tale of a family’s fight to endure.

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

ALSO ON BOOKPAGE.COM: Read Tiphanie Yanique's behind-the-book story for Land of Love and Drowning.

In The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden, Jonas Jonasson unfurls a wide, whimsical net that readers will relish being caught up in. Things go from just bad to comically worse to enjoyably ridiculous in this tongue-in-cheek tale. From South Africa to Sweden, from latrine cleanup to atom bomb cover-up, from pillows to presidents and potato farms, Jonasson’s wittily constructed web intertwines historical figures and facts with the exploits of a decidedly less plausible (but more entertaining) cast of characters.

Nombeko Mayeki, the titular “girl,” begins the novel as an illiterate savant, growing up but going nowhere in 1960s Soweto. Her goal—to reach the National Library in Pretoria—spurs a Quixotic journey that leads to encounters with three Han dynasty pottery forgers, twin Swedish brothers with identity crises, one unbalanced American Vietnam War deserter and two Israeli Mossad agents, just to highlight a few. And then there’s the kinship she develops with a Chinese official while acting as his interpreter on safari that comes in rather handy later on. The laugh-out-loud moments begin to pile up, making this book nearly impossible to put down, except to scratch your head at those same moments.

In this, his second novel—his first, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, was an international bestseller—Jonasson again exercises his flair for the satirical. It would seem nothing is outside his authorial grasp, from explaining the intricacies of nuclear energy to opining on international politics. This is an escape that manages to engage both the wit and the intellect as the characters’ scrapes turn into would-be catastrophes that are, of course, narrowly avoided. Readers of Francois Lelord and Alexander McCall Smith will find much to appreciate in Jonasson’s style.

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

Hargeisa, Somalia, was balanced on a fragile precipice in the fall of 1987—held in the grip of a powerful dictatorship, with signs of revolution emerging with ever-increasing frequency. Nadifa Mohamed’s moving, thought-provoking second novel, following Black Mamba Boy (2010), focuses on three female characters caught up in the maelstrom whose lives intersect in unforgettable ways.

Deqo is a young orphan girl who has come to Hargeisa from the local refugee camp. She is drawn to the relative safety of the city, where she sleeps in a barrel under a bridge, thus escaping the notice of the Guddi, the neighborhood watch group that supports the regime. The clothes she wears she has “grabbed from the wind . . . items that ghosts have left behind.” In return for her first pair of shoes, she signs up to dance in a pro-government rally to be held in Hargeisa’s stadium.

Also at the stadium that day is Kawsar, a widow in her late 50s who comes to the rally with friends—all forced to attend by the Guddi, though none supports the regime. When Kawsar sees Deqo being punished for not following the Guddi’s precise directions, she steps in to defend the girl—and their wrath then turns on her. Deqo manages to escape, but Kawsar is hauled off to the police station and placed in a group cell. Instead of being released after a brief interrogation, as she anticipates, Kawsar has the misfortune of confronting Filsan, a fervent young female soldier relocated to Hargeisa from Mogadishu to help suppress the growing rebellion. Filsan takes out her dissatisfaction on Kawsar, whom she first questions, then savagely beats “like a disobedient donkey.”

With a broken hip and pelvis, Kawsar is confined to her bed, unable to join her friends, who are preparing to leave the country before war breaks out. Deqo is still in hiding nearby and Filsan, who has become disillusioned with the military and its tactics, looks for a chance to escape the disintegration of her world that she know is fast approaching.

Mohamed and her family left Somalia in 1986, the year before the outbreak of the civil war about which she writes so eloquently. The story she has fashioned around these three resilient characters and how they survive is one that will resonate with readers for a long time.

Dinaw Mengestu’s third novel skillfully blends two disparate narratives—the account of an African revolution and the story of a survivor’s new life in America—to create a moving portrait of the dilemma of identity.

All Our Names is set in the 1970s, in the early days of Idi Amin’s repressive reign in Uganda. An unnamed narrator, a young man who dreams of becoming a writer, crosses the border from his native Ethiopia and meets Isaac, his contemporary from the slums of Kampala. The two “became friends the way two stray dogs find themselves linked by treading the same path every day in search of food and companionship.” They spend their days at the capital’s university campus and watch as what begin as almost playful protests, chief among them what the narrator calls their “paper revolution,” spark brutal retaliation from government thugs. Soon, the idealism of the uprising curdles into violence, with Isaac assuming a prominent role in the anti-government force.

Mengestu exposes our very human inability to truly know even those closest to us.

In chapters that alternate with that account, Helen, a social worker in a small Midwestern college town, provides the novel’s other narrative voice. The man she knows as Isaac has escaped from the African turmoil, bearing scars both physical and psychic. Helen quickly is transformed from his “chaperone into Middle America” into his lover, but the bigotry of the times compels them to conceal their interracial relationship. Despite their intimacy, Helen is haunted by her inability to penetrate to the core of Isaac’s being.

That unease is only one manifestation of the conflicting impulses that seem to define these characters. How is Isaac transformed from prankster to hardened revolutionary, someone “trying to end the nightmare this nation has become”? The narrator, who “came for the writers and stayed for the war” finds “the difference wasn’t as great as I would have thought,” and yet he vacillates between detachment and active, if reluctant, participation in the revolt. Helen, who still lives with her mother at age 30, struggles to resolve the tension between her small-town roots and the exoticism of her affair with a man from an alien culture whose past is veiled from her. In each instance, Mengestu’s unadorned prose hints at, rather than discloses, the secrets each of his characters harbors. But it’s in their mystery that he exposes a persistent fact of our existence—our inability to truly know even those closest to us.

Ellen Litman gives a new twist to the familiar coming of age/boarding school story (think A Separate Peace, Prep, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) in her second novel, Mannequin Girl. Set in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, it features the precocious daughter of two teachers whose life is radically changed when she receives a diagnosis of scoliosis.

The story begins just before 7-year-old Kat Knopman is due to start first grade at the Moscow day school where her parents are teachers. Bright and just a little bit spoiled, Kat worships her parents, the beautiful but imperious Anechka and softhearted Misha. Young Jewish intellectuals, they are involved in the arts and dabble at the fringes of radical politics. But Kat’s dream of being their star pupil ends when she is sent to a boarding school on the outskirts of the city for children with spinal ailments. Kat proves to be tougher than even her formidable teachers, unsympathetic peers and grueling medical regimens, but the consuming disappointment of not being the healthy golden child she thinks her parents want proves more restrictive than any back brace. As she matures, Kat gradually comes to accept the flaws inherent in her parents, just as she begins to outgrow the debilitating disease.

Mannequin Girl is set just at the beginning of perestroika and what became the gradual dissolution of the Soviet system. This brought more freedom, but it also revealed an ugly rise in Nationalism and anti-Semitism, which curtails Kat’s opportunities as well as those of her friends and family.

Litman, who was born in Moscow, was herself diagnosed with scoliosis and spent many years attending a similar school/sanatorium. She writes sympathetically of the shifting alliances and friendships within a boarding school, as well as the gritty details of an adolescence spent in a full-body brace. In Mannequin Girl, she has written a sharp and occasionally tender novel with a prickly protagonist readers can’t help but care for.

A middle-aged and miserable American woman reaches the end of her mental rope and absconds to some foreign or underdeveloped place to find herself—and possibly a mate. This new genre encompasses the wildly popular if dissimilar Eat, Pray, Love and Wild. Add to these a novel, A Well-Tempered Heart by Jan-Philipp Sendker, where the unlikely foreign setting is Myanmar, aka Burma.

Julia (whose surname is not Roberts) is a New York lawyer suffering not from the corresponding neuroses but from an actual possession, by the spirit of a departed Burmese woman, Nu Nu. Thus lost in reincarnation, Julia travels to Burma to learn this woman's story and thereby liberate them both.

This magical realism proves short-lived, as Julia confronts the reality of Burma under its imperishable military regime. The book mainly concerns itself with Nu Nu and her two sons, who are conscripted into the army and face the possibility of becoming human mine detectors. Desperate to save them, Nu Nu solicits a Burmese soldier in exchange for the freedom of, alas, only one of her sons.

Emerging from this nightmarish but plausible scenario, it's hard to determine whether Julia should remain in Burma, where she is maybe happy, or return to New York, where she isn't. Yet the novel coheres and holds the attention. Sendker is a German journalist formerly based in Asia, so it’s a surprising that he allows Julia to succumb to a starry-eyed reaction to the seemingly serene and smiley Orient of legend, which, in Burma, coexists with a military that employs rape as a weapon of war. Julia is spared much dwelling on this unsettling juxtaposition.

A Well-Tempered Heart will appeal to romantics and pessimists alike, but may not satisfy either. History abounds with examples of love conquering all. Recent reforms notwithstanding, modern Burma hasn't been one of them. Still, the world and literature are richer for the contest, which is engagingly drawn here.

America is anomalous, as insular as its two oceans suggest. Consider the game known stateside as soccer and elsewhere as football. An American would struggle to name a global soccer star, despite their commanding astronomical salaries and divine admiration. The Sun and Other Stars, by Chicago author Brigid Pasulka, offers a glimpse into the glamour and goofiness of the so-called "beautiful game.”

In the Italian town of San Benedetto, Etto, a butcher's son, struggles to resist the delirium that soccer inflicts on the citizenry. He instead frets about the untimely deaths of his brother and mother—by moped and suicide, respectively. More pointedly, he is unsure he belongs, not least because his father is determined to make Etto a butcher as well.

Etto's sun-soaked stasis is disturbed by the arrival of a renowned Ukrainian soccer player, Yuri, and his fetching sister, Zhuki. The callow butcher-to-be is smitten, and his bumbling attempts at winning Zhuki's love are accompanied by attempts at mastering soccer under Yuri's tutelage. Eventually Etto realizes that soccer gives hope to the downtrodden, which may explain the sport's weak hold on rich America. Etto increasingly appreciates his town and confronts the ghosts of his departed loved ones.

The Sun and Other Stars bursts with a Mediterranean ease and exuberance.

The Sun and Other Stars bursts with a Mediterranean ease and exuberance. It can be very funny, though sometimes not funny enough, as the author revels in digs at other nationalities, from tight-fisted Germans to overfed Americans. The Italians don't escape either, with elders bemoaning the corruption of soccer by excessive pay, while they themselves act as farcically as their politicians.

But this is no elegy to soccer's past. Like Etto, the prose is energetic and carefree, reminiscent perhaps of Dave Eggers or Salman Rushdie. This lighthearted and affectionate novel could help transform soccer into more than just an adjective that precedes “mom.”

When Edmund de Waal began to research the history of his family, he had no idea that he was embarking on a journey that would take him five years to complete and would encompass several continents. His exploration of the wealthy Ephrussis family became the subject of the award-winning memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes. As part of his research, de Waal’s father handed him a stack of manuscripts belonging to Edmund’s grandmother, Elisabeth de Waal, including the novel The Exiles Return, which is now being published for the first time.

Elisabeth Ephrussis de Waal was born into an exceptionally privileged family in turn-of-the-century Vienna. She studied philosophy and economics and was also a gifted poet. Living in Paris and then London, she traveled to Vienna weeks after the German invasion of 1938 to save her parents and was able to bring her father to England. After the war, she returned to Vienna to discover what had happened to her family and their belongings, a quest that kept her working for justice for more than a decade.

Set in Vienna in the early 1950s, The Exiles Return is less a novel than a series of tightly written overlapping portraits of exiles coming to terms with a radically changed landscape. Jewish scientist Professor Kuno Adler has been living in America, safely, albeit unhappily, with his corsetiere wife. He goes back, not just to Vienna, but to the laboratory where he once worked, insisting they owe him his previous job. Despite lingering anti-Semitism, Vienna is his home, and he is eager to reclaim it. Most poignant is the arrival of Resi, the brooding teenage daughter of a Viennese princess. Raised in America, Resi is sent back to Vienna to stay with relatives, and, like a Henry James heroine, her innocence is no match for European experience, made all the more desperate in the postwar economy. But it is postwar Vienna that is de Waal’s greatest character, a city trying to rebuild in a totally altered world after terrible devastation.

The Exiles Return explores identity, loss, departure and perhaps the greater pain of return. Though none of these characters are a direct portrait of their creator, each one carries a fragment of her experience. The clear, almost spare writing leaves plenty of space in which to imagine the powerful emotions at play in this quietly devastating novel.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Edmund de Waal for The Exiles Return.

Norwegian author Gaute Heivoll’s remarkable amalgam of mystery and memoir revolves around a series of arson fires set in a small village in southern Norway during May and June of 1978. The reader learns the identity of the arsonist quite early in Before I Burn, but it becomes apparent that what really intrigues the author is those affected by the fires—not only the families whose barns and simple homes were reduced to ashes, but also the family of the arsonist.

Heivoll was born in the very village where the fires took place, barely two months before the first one erupted. Throughout his childhood he had heard the stories—as the family car slowly passed “the pyromaniac’s house,” or when his father pointed out the barn that burned down “when you were christened.” Some 30 years later, the stories began to gnaw at his psyche, and Heivoll realized he had to delve into the lingering memories of those still alive to try and piece together the puzzle. By means of interviews, diaries and letters from the arsonist during his years of imprisonment, Heivoll gradually constructs a model of what might have happened during those tense weeks, when residents sat silently on their doorsteps all night hoping to catch the arsonist—described only as tall, thin and probably young by one victim, who glimpsed him through the smoke engulfing her kitchen.

Readers of Scandinavian mysteries from authors like Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbø or Karin Fossum will surely enjoy Heivoll’s superb sense of place and his depiction of this isolated village, surrounded by forest but still lit almost all night in the middle of summer. Like Fossum, he writes from the viewpoint of all connected to the fires, including the arsonist, adding to the reader’s understanding. And readers of the quiet, piercing prose of Per Petterson, like the acclaimed Out Stealing Horses (2007), will especially appreciate Heivoll’s spare, emotional telling of this life-changing episode.