Novels

literature, community, education, social justice

(alphabetically by title A-I)

“Transforming silence into language and action” — Audre Lorde

Afterlife (2020) - Julia Alvarez

Antonia, whose family emigrated from the Dominican Republic, is a newly retired professor of English. Suddenly and completely unexpectedly, she has to learn to navigate life as a widow. While trying to figure out what form her deceased husband Sam’s “afterlife” will take, and how to grieve the loss of her life’s partner, she is confronted with two other challenges. Her older sister, Izzy, who suffers from bipolar disorder, has disappeared, and her two younger sisters need help finding her. Mario, a young Mexican migrant farm worker and his newly arrived pregnant girlfriend, Estela, are also in need of Antonia’s assistance. Antonia is faced with a conundrum: “who is the most important?” and “what is the right thing to do?” Alvarez artfully weaves together weighty themes: the afterlife, sisterhood, migrant identity and politics, and the responsibility of human beings to each other.

She is keeping to her routines, walking a narrow path through the loss—not allowing her thoughts to stray. Occasionally, she takes sips of sorrow, afraid the big wave might wash her away. Widows leaping a husband’s pyre; mothers jumping into a child’s grave (p. 6).
(Sam) was the bold one. She, the reluctant activist, though everyone assumed it was she who was the political one by virtue of her ethnicity, as if being Latina automatically conferred a certain radical stance (p. 18).
Wouldn’t it be a great book?…Short chapters about the people who keep our world going? Invisible people we don’t even know about? (p. 33).
The landscape of grief is not very inviting. Visitors don’t want to linger (p. 44).
It’s finally come: the frightening moment she has fought so hard to prevent, when not just the world but the words fall apart, and the plunge goes on and on and on (p. 222).

Afterlives (2020) –Abdulrazak Gurnah

In Afterlives, Nobel Laureate (2021) and Zanzibarian Abdulrazak Gurnah writes about turmoil and unrest in East Africa at the turn of the 19th century. This was a period marked by war, brutality, starvation and scarcity with German and British colonial armies and their native recruits fighting each other for control over territory, resources and trade routes. The first half of the novel focuses on the battles in the region–the ferocity of the colonialists in subduing native populations, the personalities of the officers, their servants and camp followers. Faced with frequent uprisings and revolts, the colonialists pursued a “scorched earth” policy, burning villages to the ground, killing villagers and their livestock, often kidnapping young boys, inculcating them with the values of the colonizers, and forcing them into labor.

Gurnah introduces us to three main characters whose lives follow very different paths but whose stories are woven together. Masterful at his portraits of men–their idiosyncrasies and contradictions, their desires and dreams–Gurnah’s portraits of women are less complex and hence less satisfying.

Khalifa is a young man from a poor family, the son of an Indian man and a countrywoman, who works for an Indian merchant, marries the merchant’s niece and manages to avoid fighting in the war. Ilyas runs away from home as a young boy, is captured by the Germans, attends a German school and then enlists in the German army known as the schutztruppe. Before Ilyas enlists, he and Khalifa become friends. Khalifa encourages Ilyas to search for his family in the village of his birth where he learns that his parents have died but his younger sister Afiya is a servant for another family. Khalifa tries in vain to discourage Ilyas from joining the schutztruppe:

Are you mad? What has this to do with you?. . .This is between two violent and vicious invaders, one among us and the other to the north. They are fighting over who should swallow us whole. What has this to do with you? You will be joining an army of mercenaries renowned for their cruelty and brutality. Didn’t you hear what everyone was saying? You might be badly hurt . . .worse even. Are you thinking straight, my friend (p. 47)?

When Ilyas enlists, Afiya, who is abused by the family she lives with, goes to live with Khalifa and his wife.

A third character, Hamza joins the German army as a foot soldier or askari. Training is brutal and recruits are constantly demeaned and humiliated. Nonetheless, the author manages to offer some insight into how some native peoples become brainwashed, join forces with their oppressors, become empowered and adopt their mindset.

. . .Hamza found unexpected satisfaction in his own growing strength and skills, and after a while he no longer winced at the shouts of schwein (pig) and washenzi (uncivilized) or the German words he did not yet understand. . .Unexpectedly, he began to feel pride at being part of the group, not rejected and mocked as he had feared, but there to share in the punishing routines and the exhaustion. . .When they started going out on maneuvers he saw the terror of the villagers when the askari arrived and could not suppress a thrill of pleasure at their fright (pp. 66-67).

Early on in the fighting, Hamza is injured and spends time far from battle, healing at the home and parish of a German missionary. Not unlike Christian missionaries elsewhere, missionaries in East Africa also served to indoctrinate young minds into believing in their own inferiority and European superiority. Gazing out over the landscape, the pastor speaks with Hamza:

Sunset gives a benign aspect to the landscape, doesn’t it? Yet it is a landscape where you know that nothing of any importance has ever happened. . .It is a place of no significance whatsoever in the history of human achievement or endeavor. You could tear this page out of human history and it would not make a difference to anything. You can understand why people can live contentedly in such a place, even though they are plagued by so many diseases. . .At least, it was like that until we came and brought them words of discontent like progress and sin and salvation. The people here all share one quality, they cannot hold an idea for long. At times this can seem deceitful but it is really a lack of seriousness, an unreliability, a failure in application. That’s why it is necessary to repeat instructions and to supervise. Just imagine, if we left here tomorrow they will return like bush to their old ways (p. 141).

In the second half of the novel, the British have outmaneuvered the Germans and the war is over. Gurnah brings us into the afterlives of the main characters, where he addresses fundamental questions: After witnessing so much violence and suffering and engaging in such horrid acts, how is it possible to regain a sense of self, and recover one’s humanity? How does one make life meaningful? For Hamza, who begins again with nothing, it means learning a trade, falling in love, marrying Ilyas’ sister Afiya, and having a family. Ilyas, who settles in Germany, chooses quite a different path.

The Anomaly (2021) - Hervé Le Tellier

Originally published in French in 2020 as L’Anomalie, The Anomaly is a futuristic novel which asks us to question the meaning of our humanity and whether we are masters of our lives or are we simply predestined to act and live according to our biology.

I have not made a single gesture in my life. I know that, from time immemorial, it is gestures that have made me, that not one movement has been made under my own control. My body has been happy to come alive, pulled by strings I did not attach. It is presumptuous to imply that we master the space around us, when we simply follow the curves of least resistance. The limitation of limitations. No takeoff will unfold our sky. ever (p. 27).

Le Tellier, a lively professional in podcasting, teaching, science journalism and writing, brings together his expertise in this incredibly challenging novel about an Air France flight from Paris to New York that spins out of control, only to eventually land safely; except that the same Boeing 787 appears to have landed 4 months earlier with the same crew and passengers. The mystery behind these harrowing events unfolds as we engage with many of the passengers, who must confront their doppelganger and the meaning of their lives. Among these characters are both the respectable and not so respectable; the acclaimed and ordinary; those who are unable to confront their double or unable to confront themselves; and those who are able to meld the anomaly of their double into a rewarding life, such as the Nigerian pop star who begins a new life with his twin as his musical partner. One of the most telling and humorous chapters focuses on philosophers called in to make meaning of the event. The President of the United States, agreeing to hear yet another hypothetical explanation of the parallel events, says, “Go ahead…make it quick,” and the philosopher states, “ … it’s fairly probable that we are some kind of simulated consciousness… and that Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ is now…” I think therefore I’m almost certainly a program” (p. 197-199).

Le Tellier begins the novel with the following quote attributed to Victor Miesel, an unsuccessful writer in the novel who commits suicide: “[t]here is something admirable that always surpasses knowledge, intelligence, and even genius, and that is incomprehension ( p. 1).” The novel succeeds in leaving the reader with an apparent paradox–meaningful incomprehension–that is, a sense of incomprehension that admonishes us to question our understanding of human existence and that suggests the more we know of our existence the more incomprehensible it is.

The plot is extraordinary in its reflection of American culture, especially since the author is French with an American translator Adrianna Hunter. The Anomaly combines the essence of good literature, exceptional prose with a tantalizing plot,one that raises more questions than it answers. “What difference,” the narrator asks, “ would it make for them, after all? Simulated or not, we all live, feel, love, suffer, create, and die, each leaving our own tiny trace in the simulation. What point is there in knowing?” (p. 234).

Apeirogon (2020) - Colum McCann

apeirogon - a figure or shape (polygon) with an infinite number of countable sides.

Exactly how something can be at once “infinite” and “countable” would appear to be an impossibility as the two are mutually exclusive by definition. And yet, at least conceptually, in geometry, “apeirogons” exist.

In Apeirogon, Colum McCann takes on what is perhaps, one of the longest standing conflicts in the world—the crisis in the Middle East—and leads us to a solution that for decades has eluded statesmen and stateswomen alike, and has seemed an absolute impossibility. The story is based on the real lives and experiences of two extraordinary men, Basaam Aramin (a Palestinian), and Rami Elhanan (an Israeli), both of whom lost their young daughters to the war. Their unlikely friendship, their respect and compassion for each other and their ability to preserve their humanity and dignity in an oppressive and dangerous environment which would otherwise turn them into enemies, is central to the possibility for peace and reconciliation.

Rami and Basaam travel the countryside at great risk to themselves, meeting with groups of people, all of whom have lost someone close to them in the conflict. Following them, we learn about the Wall the Israelis built to separate Palestinians from Jews, and Palestinians from their land and water; we learn about “sterile roads” reserved for Jews only, the “sound bombs” that Israelis use to destroy wells in the West Bank, the everyday harassment of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, the brutality of the apartheid system* created by the Israeli government and the horror of suicide bombings.

McCann writes of Rami and Basaam’s peacemaking efforts and how people come from all over the region and the world,

to listen to (their) stories, and to find within their stories another story, a song of songs, discovering themselves—you and me—in the stone-tiled chapel where we sit for hours, eager, hopeless, buoyed, confused, cynical, complicit, silent, our memories imploding, our synapses skipping, in the gathering dark, remembering, while listening, all of those stories that are yet to be told (p. 229).

About Rami, McCann writes, “He wanted to waken the sleep in his listeners. To see a jolt in them. Just for a split second. To see an eye open. Or a lifted brow. That was enough. A crack in the wall, he said. A crease of doubt. Anything” (p. 47).

And about Basaam he writes, “It struck him early on that people were afraid of the enemy because they were terrified their lives might get diluted, that they might lose themselves in the tangle of knowing each other” (p. 124).

Rami watches a Palestinian woman getting off the bus, and suddenly realizes that virtually everyone is grieving the loss of someone they love:

And then I saw it, she had a picture of her daughter clutched to her chest. She walked past me. I couldn’t move. And this was like an earthquake inside me: this woman had lost her child. it maybe sounds simple, but it was not. I had been in a sort of coffin. This lifted the lid from my eyes. My grief and her grief, the same grief (p. 223)…

Soon after, he comes to understand why peace has been so difficult and what has to happen in order for the war to end:

Some people have an interest in keeping the silence. Others have an interest in sowing hatred based on fear. Fear makes money, and it makes laws, and it takes land, and it builds settlements, and fear likes to keep everyone silent. And let’s face it, in Israel we are very good at fear, it occupies us…We use the word security to silence others. But it’s not about that, it’s about occupying someone else’s life, someone else’s land, someone else’s head. It’s about control. Which is power. And I realized this with the force of an axe, that it’s true, this notion of speaking truth against power. Power already knows the truth. It tries to hide it… We could not continue to disavow the possibility of living alongside each other. I’m not asking for everyone to get along…, but I’m asking for them to be allowed to get along. (so) what can you do personally…to help prevent this unbearable pain for others?… I’ve devoted my time, my life…to convey this very basic message..: We are not doomed, but we have to try to smash the forces that have an interest in keeping us silent (p. 224).
You never heal, don’t let anyone tell you that you ever fully heal—it’s the living who have to bury the dead. I pay the price, sometimes I despair, but what else is there to be in the end, but hopeful? What else are we going to do? Walk away, kill ourselves, kill each other? That’s already happened, it didn’t achieve much. I know that it will not be over until we talk to each other…Joining with others saved my life. We cannot imagine the harm we are doing by not listening to each other, and I mean this on every level. It is immeasurable… (p. 227).

*A highly recommended and moving documentary film that compares the current system of apartheid created by Israel to the former system of apartheid in South Africa is called “Roadmap to Apartheid” (2012) directed by Eron Davidson and Ana Nogueira, narrated by Alice Walker.

The Bell Jar (50th Anniversary Edition, 2013) - Sylvia Plath

More than fifty years after it was first published, Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar, remains a classic. In this coming-of-age story, Esther Greenwood narrates her downward spiral into mental illness and her tenuous journey towards wellness. Plath’s choice of a first-person narratorallows her to portray Esther’s views on her troubled life and on the world around her with blunt honesty and without pathos.

The book opens with Esther in Manhattan, where she is working as an intern for the fashion magazine Mademoiselle. She is one of twelve winners in the magazine’s creative writing contest, with a month-long all-expenses-paid trip to New York as the prize.

To an outside observer, Esther has all the ingredients for a successful future: a scholarship at a first-rate college, a budding career as a writer, a boyfriend at Yale. But she is not interested in living a conventional life. She latches onto Doreen, another prizewinner, who is ripe for adventure. Though eager for new experiences, Esther remains more of an observer of life than a participant therein. While at a bar with Doreen, she notes, “I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d neer seen before in my life” (p. 11). About New York she muses, “The city hung in my window, flat as a poster glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me” (p. 20).

Although men are often on her mind, Esther is leery of long-term commitments. Contemplating an affair with a UN interpreter named Constantin, she anticipates how it might end: “I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him” (p. 92). Marriage is, for her, out of the question: “The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket” (p. 92).

When Esther doesn’t get accepted to a summer writing workshop, she is forced to return to her home in the suburbs till the start of the fall semester. Reflecting on her childhood, she realizes how unhappy she has been since her father’s death:

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was 9 years old. . . After that–in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college with crewing in the mist before breakfast and blackbottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day–I had never been really happy again (p. 83).

Confronted with the dullness of life in the suburbs, Esther’s mental state deteriorates. The reader is privy to all of Esther’s dark thoughts. She fantasizes about multiple ways to commit suicide and even goes so far as to make some hesitant attempts.

Eventually, Esther is sent to a private asylum. On the way there, she contemplates leaping out of the car and jumping into the Charles River. She feels that wherever she might be, she would be “sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in [her] own sour air” (p. 207).

Plath narrates in chilling detail not only Esther’s experiences at the asylum, but also those of other patients. Fortunately for Esther, she is assigned to a compassionate female doctor, under whose guidance she gradually improves. After a successful shock treatment, Esther states, “All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended,a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air” (p. 240).

Esther’s potential release from the asylum causes her concern. She muses, “I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead–after all, I had been ‘analyzed.’ Instead, all I could see were question marks” (p. 272). Plath finishes her masterful semi-autobiographical novel on this fitting note of uncertainty.

Bewilderment (2021) - Richard Powers

Bewilderment is an inspiring and devastating novel about the inner and outer spheres of our existence. After the death of his mother (who was an animal rights activist), ten-year-old Robbie and his father, Theo visit other worlds on imaginary planets to experience the potential in the universe. Eventually, they explore the inner world of neurofeedback treatment for Robbie, to see if he can learn to control the emotional conflicts and grief in his life.

Often ostracized for being different, school is a difficult environment for Robbie to navigate. Theo decides to take him out of school for a week to go camping in the Smoky mountains, where Theo reinforces an appreciation for the diversity of life surrounding them:

Humus tainted the air. For more than a mile, the trail ascended as steeply as a set of stairs. Spectral shadows followed us as we passed through the shedding broadleaves. We rounded an outcrop of mossy boulders, and the world changed from damp cove hardwood into drier pine and oak. It was a mast year. Acorns piled up across the trail…(p. 17).
Six different kinds of forest all around us. Seventeen hundred flowering plants. More tree species than in all of Europe. Thirty kinds of salamander, for God’s sake. Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head (p. 19).

When Robbie makes the case for home-schooling. Theo thinks: “He’d discovered, on his own, what formal education tried to deny: Life wanted something from us. And time was running out (p. 163).”

As an astrobiologist whose job is to assemble atmospheric and other data that have been recorded from outer space in order to determine the possibility of life on other planets, Theo transfigures circumstances in which life elsewhere may or may not resemble any known life form on Earth:

I made worlds by the thousands. I simulated their surfaces and cores and living atmospheres. I surveyed the ratios of telltale gases that might accumulate, depending on the planet’s evolving inhabitants…When the space-born telescope that all my models waited for was launched at last, we’d already have spectral fingerprints on file to match to any imaginable perpetrator of the crime of life (p. 64)

Later, Theo concludes: “I'd missed something obvious, in over thirty years of reading and two thousand science fiction books: there was no place stranger than here” ( p. 140).

In a taxi on his way to testify before Congress on the value and importance of his work, Theo reflects:

I felt us traveling on a small craft, piloting through the capital city of the reigning global superpower on the coast of the third largest continent of a smallish, rocky world near the inner rim of the habitable zone of a G-type dwarf star that lay a quarter of the way out to the edge of a dense, large, barred, spiral galaxy that drifted through a thinly spread cluster in the dead center of the universe.
We pulled into the hotel’s circular drive and the cabbie said, ‘Here we are. Comfort Inn’ (p. 210).

Theo’s work is dependent on launching into space a powerful telescope, the “Seeker” which will record more accurate data from distant galaxies. This project necessarily requires government support. However, he soon realizes the unlikelihood of that happening:

Our side claimed the discovery of Earths would increase humanity’s collective wisdom and empathy. The President’s men said that wisdom and empathy were collectivist plots to crash our standard of living (p. 175).
I knew then why these men wanted to kill this project. The cost overruns were just an excuse. The country’s ruling party would have opposed the Seeker even if it were free. Finding other Earths was a globalist plot deserving the Tower of Babel treatment. If we academic elites found that life arose all over, it wouldn’t say much for humanity’s Special Relationship with God (p. 218).

Robbie says: “Everything looks different on different planets. That’s why we need to find them” (p. 220).

Demon Copperhead (2022) - Barbara Kingsolver

In her tenth novel, Kingsolver unflinchingly recreates the impact of relentless poverty on the people in rural western Virginia–one of America’s forgotten places. Once home to proud farmers, many of whom lost their homes to coal mining magnates, Appalachia has been ransacked and unearthed, then left with many of its mountains and rivers destroyed, its schools impoverished, and the majority of its inhabitants unemployed. The only apparently thriving industry–the sale of illegal drugs–takes its toll on the population, especially young people. Many grow up in broken homes and/or foster care, surrounded by violence, hunger and hopelessness, with little else to look forward to as adults.

The world turns and there’s no God anymore, no country, but it’s still in your blood that coal is God’s gift and you want to believe…Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed (p. 280).

Nevertheless, this is much more than a story of devastation and heartbreak. It is truly a story of resilience as told by a boy entering young adulthood. Born on the floor of a trailer to a teenage mom, Demon Copperhead experiences the pain and grief of loss and the horror of abuse. But all along the way, there are people at key points in his life who make a difference.

Demon is first fostered at “Creaky’s” farm (essentially a child labor camp), the same place as Fast Forward, the star quarterback in Demon’s school. Fast Forward renames Demon “Diamond.”

It’s hard to believe I could look back on Creaky Farm in any wishful way, but I missed having Fast Forward on my team. Fast Man that had made me feel hard and shiny as a diamond. I knew there was a dark side, he let others take his lickings, but that was him teaching us: a person can keep his head up and rise high, even if he wasn’t lucky enough to get born up there. In all the years of no adult ever taking my side, he showed me it was possible to work them at their own game and win (p. 159).

Then there are the owners of his mom’s trailer, the Peggots (along with their grandson, Maggot), who live next door and sometimes provide Demon with clothes, food and kindness when he is a young boy. One Christmas, the Peggot’s daughter June, a nurse in Knoxville, gives Demon a set of colored pencils which becomes his most prized possession. And much later she helps him get into rehab.

The day before June went home she called me upstairs and laid down the cards. She could get me into a Suboxone clinic. No probing questions as to what I was on, she wasn’t beating around the bush…she could reenroll me in Medicaid, a simple thing that none of my guardians had thought to do…It would cover me in a rehab clinic for a couple of weeks. Nothing fancy, just to get me over the worst, and after that I could go into a halfway-house situation. All I could picture was half a house with the front ripped off… (p. 497).

Demon’s grandmother (his father’s mother), for whom he searches when he is just eleven years old, also plays a positive role in his young life.

What finally lit a flame under my grandmother’s ass was school. That I wasn’t going…All the sudden she’s acting like it’s an emergency, and I’m wondering, Where’s the fire, lady? I’d laid out of school plenty, mostly due to grown-ups wanting to get some better use out of me. Not this one. She’d have no part in me growing up an ignorant bastard (p. 206).

His grandmother’s brother, Mr. Dick, is confined to a wheelchair (both because of a congenital spinal condition and abuse by other boys when he was a child). He makes kites on which he writes gems culled from the many books he reads. Just before Demon is sent back to Lee County to go to school and live with the high school football coach, Mr. Dick makes a kite for Demon with his own words: Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you (p. 210).

Demon helps Mr. Dick to fly his kite and reflects on this man who has suffered so much in his life.

He was quiet, holding the string and kite with everything he had. The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant (p. 210).

The high school art teacher, Annie, recognizes and encourages Demon’s talent as an artist and arranges for him to study art with her when he is still in junior high.

She wanted to know if I’d taken any class or seen any drawing shows on TV, which I didn’t know existed. She kept on being amazed until the bell rang and I couldn’t believe an hour was up. She said I had a natural talent and did I want to work with her on improving it. Perspectives, composition, etc…I could try out other media that she had a whole studio full of. Art supplies other than pencils. Jesus God (p. 258).

Annie’s husband Mr. Armstrong, a guidance counselor and history teacher, also supports Demon. One day he assigns the class a project to find out about their family histories.

Almost everybody in our class had great-grandparents that came over from some country to work in the mines. Or they were here already, and worked in the mines. They told stories of all the kids in a family ending up working in a mine underneath the same land that was bought from them. The coal guys came in here buying up land without mentioning the buried treasure under it. And then all that was left was to work (p. 277).

Finally, there’s the football coach’s daughter, Angus, who takes Demon shopping soon after he arrives at Coach’s house (and over time becomes his good friend).

Angus looked me up and down. “May I say the brothers of mystery have handed you down some weird-ass apparel?” I told her to go to hell for real. I didn’t feel like explaining how you get used to people looking at you like trash, so it’s hard to care what kind of trash you put on the trash every morning. “Just say!’ she yelled. “What the hell kind of shoes would make you happy?” “Fine. Air Maxes!” I yelled back at her, because who wouldn’t. “But I’m not getting any the hell kind of shoes today because I’m fucking broke, okay?”…Angus replied, “No. I’m saying, sorry for not getting straight with you. My bad.” She whipped a slice of silver out of her pocket and tilted it up and down in the light, like a mirror flashing code. “Meet the Master,” she said (pp. 224-25).

Demon is a perspicacious, sometimes idealistic–though more often pessimistic–survivor.

What I said before about having some golden time of life where it’s all good, your people have got your back, and you don’t notice? That’s how the cruel world bites you. I have bad days galore to look back on, the shamings and hard fists, and I’ll tell you what. It’s the golden times that kill me. I had two. And like a son of a bitch, I missed them both (p. 254).

In Demon’s voice and through his being, Kingsolver gives us an “in your face” view of this world and the daily struggles of its inhabitants. The people in Demon’s life are complex and multi-faceted. In addition, every incident from the first page to the last is set against the backdrop of a landscape that often acts as a magnet to the people born in the region.

I found a good rock and watched the sun melt into the Cumberlands. Layers of orange like a buttermilk pie cooling on the horizon. Clouds scooting past, throwing spots of light and dark over the mountainheads. The light looked drinkable. It poured on a mountain so I saw the curve of every treetop edged in gold, like the scales of a fish. Then poured off, easing them back into shadow (p. 507).

All of these elements not only offer us a deeper understanding of the battles currently being fought and the obstacles confronting many in our nation. They also become etched into our consciousness as unforgettable characters and haunting images.

Desert (2009) - J.M.G. Le Clézio

Originally published in French in 1980, Désert, was translated into English in 2009 by C. Dickson. It is a lyrical novel, every paragraph a poem—of perseverance and suffering, of dread and hope.

Desert is two stories woven together—the first is about the forced migration of the desert’s original tribes by French conquerors who, in the early 20th century, sought to colonize the most productive and geopolitically advantageous land in North Africa—land for which they were determined to fight and kill. This meant thousands upon thousands of native peoples died, if not in battle, then because of exhaustion, thirst and starvation while searching for a safe haven.

…Anxiety was also present in the sharp odors of sweat, of urine, of hunger—so much acridity seeping up from the ground and from the hidden recesses of the camp. It mounted as food became scarcer, a few pepper dates, sour milk, and oatmeal to be swallowed hastily at the crack of dawn, when the sun had not yet risen from the dunes. Anxiety was in the murky water of the well that the tramping of humans and beasts had disturbed and that green tea could not improve. Sugar had been rare for a long time, and honey too, and the dates were dry as rocks, and the tough pungent meat came from camels that had died of exhaustion. Anxiety rising in the dry mouths and bloody fingers, in the weight that bore down on the heads and shoulders of the men, in the heat of day, and then in the cold of night, making children shiver in the folds of worn carpets (pp. 28-29).
Then, after all those days of anger and fear on the earth and in the sky, after all those freezing nights in which one slept very little and awoke suddenly for no particular reason, eyes feverish, body soaked with rank sweat, after all that time, the long days that slowly killed off elderly people and infants, suddenly without anyone knowing why, the people knew that the time to depart had come (p. 30).
No one had forgotten the gnawing hunger, not only hunger for food, but all sorts of hunger. Hunger for hope and for freedom, hunger for everything that is missing and that digs out a dizzy hollow in the ground, hunger that pushes a man forward into the cloud of dust amongst the dazed animals, hunger that makes him climb all the way up hillsides until he must start back down again, with hundreds of identical hills stretching out before him ( p. 36).

The second story is more contemporary, about the legacies of slavery and colonization—poverty and marginalization, the loss of “home,” language, a sense of cultural identity, belonging—for the descendants of the original peoples of the desert who managed to survive. Master of description, Le Clézio opens this second story with the bond that is created between a sensitive and compassionate young girl named Lalla, and a young shepherd boy, the Hartani, who cannot or does not speak. Both are descendants of original tribes.

…When her skin touches that of the Hartani, it makes a strange wave of heat run through her body, a dizzy feeling. It’s the heat of the sun that has been sinking into their bodies all day long and that is now flowing out in long feverish waves. Their breaths touch too, mingle, for there is no more need for words, only for what they feel. It’s a dizziness she has never felt before, that has grown out of the shadows in the cave in just a few seconds, as if the stone walls and the damp shadows have been waiting a long time for them to come in order to release their powers….she can distinctly hear the pulsing of her blood mixed with the sounds of drops of water on the walls and the small cries of the bats. As if their bodies were now one with the inside of the cave, or were prisoners in the entrails of a giant (p. 107).

Lalla”s aunt tries to marry her off to an older man from the city, but Lalla runs away in search of the Hartani. When she finds him in the desert, they go off together.

…Night has eased the fever of the sun and the dryness. Thirst, hunger, anxiety have all been relieved by the light of the galaxy, and on her skin, like droplets, are the marks of each star in the sky. The two children can no longer see the earth now, holding tightly to one another, they are wheeling out through the open sky (pp. 176-177).

Lalla ends up in Marseilles, France (with her aunt), first spending time on the street and eventually modeling for a photographer. But then Lalla returns home. And Le Clézio again weaves in the story of the early migrants and refugees, connecting the past with the present.

Disappearing Earth (2019) - Julia Phillips

The setting (and main character): A remote, wild peninsula in northeastern Russia called Kamchatka, home to volcanoes, tundras, forests, reindeer and people belonging to a number of different ethnic groups—many of whom have lived on the land and fished in the seas for centuries.

The story revolves around the disappearance of two young girls, sisters Alyona and Sophia, who often spent the day at the water’s edge near their home in Gorizont, while their mother Marina worked at the newspaper in town.

Month by month, we enter the diverse worlds of the women of Kamchatka, and feel their preoccupation with the girls’ disappearance, its impact on their own lives, as well as their involvement in the search for the missing sisters. We learn about conflicts between ethnic groups and peoples’ distrust of outsiders like Muscovites and those who hail from St. Petersburg.

Ksyusha’s family have been herders for generations. She leaves her village, Esso, to attend university in the city, but returns home in the summer.

Esso in the summertime was beautiful—cottages were repainted in primary colors, gardens grew dense with vegetables, the rivers ran high, and the mountains that surrounded the village turned dark with foliage. Ksyusha did not get to appreciate the sight until she was seventeen years old. Instead, the demands of herding ruled her summers (p. 68).
In early summer, the herders drove the deer closer to the village, so the animals could graze on mosses only thirty kilometers from home instead of three hundred. All the same, to reach them Ksyusha’s family had to ride on horses for hours through plains and mountain passes…The horses aged, their paces slowed, but the tundra kept the same shrill degree of emptiness…The blue-lit black of nights. The limitless dry yellow of days. for all that she loathed about those summers, setting up camp in the rain and pretending not to hear insults spoken in Even and growing sick from the smell of singed fur, they had become some of the most vivid times of her life…the early morning packing of tents…making their way along the thousand-kilometer loop of trails that took the herd a year to cover (pp. 81-82).

The impact of the girls’ disappearance is most acutely felt by their mother Marina:

No, Alyona and Sophia did not drown that day. They were taken. This was the knowledge that depressed Marina’s lungs. She understood how such cases took shape…she was familiar, from her early work and latest research, with the other side of the news. Kidnappings around the world. Police corruption. Sexual assaults. Abuse. Children murdered. Alyona’s and Sophia’s school pictures appeared on her own front page—their faces alike as two drops of water, their finely combed hair... (p. 245).

Kamchatka seeps into your pores—its beauty and ruggedness—and for weeks after actually reading and discussing the novel, we were still absorbed by the landscape and the unsettling story that Phillips tells. (For example, we noticed when the NY Times published a short article in the Travel section about bears hunting wild Pacific salmon in Kamchatka—describing it as a “compact, volcanic Eden.” [In: “Forged by Volcanoes, Kamchatka Offers Majestic, Magnetic Wilds,” by Eva Sohlman and Neil Macfarquhar.” NY Times, October 17, 2019.])

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2019) - Olga Tokarczuk

Tokarczuk’s main character, Janina, is just one of many “oddballs” (one of whom Janina actually refers to as “Oddball”) in this peculiarly fascinating novel. When Janina’s dog is suddenly found dead, she begins a search for the murderer(s). In her mind, “every unjustly inflicted death deserve(s) public exposure. Even an insect’s.” Soon local citizens are dying under unusual circumstances. But it is not merely the amassing of corpses that keeps the reader turning the page. Tokarczuk’s philosophical musings on topics as diverse as the human body, the human condition, insects, birds, mold, the law, William Blake, and astrology are equally entertaining, full of insight and humor.

A believer in horoscopes, Janina laments, “There’s no escaping it. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful. We’d prefer to think we’re free” (p. 11).

And, “I realized that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. It lies at the foundation of everything. It is the fifth element, the quintessence” (p. 47).

Janina thinks herself, “the best conversations are with yourself. At least there’s no risk of a misunderstanding.”

The Earth Spinner (2022) - Anuradha Roy

In this complex novel Anuradha Roy explores several themes: the power of art, the creativity of artists, cultural differences, and romantic and familial love. On one level this is a coming of age novel, as we follow young Sara from her childhood in her home town in Andhra Pradesh to her university days in England. At the same time, we follow the life of Elango, her teacher, a master potter. A third character, Elango’s dog Chinna, helps weave together various threads of the storyline. The author uses multiple types of narrative devices–diary entries, letters, first-person and third-person narration–which allows her to change back and forth between Sara’s and Elango’s perspectives. Her last chapter, however, is devoted to Chinna, the one character who seems relatively unfazed by the spinning earth.

Roy is at her best when portraying her artists’ inspirational moments. She describes the first time Sara feels at one with her artistry, after a butterfly lands on her cheek and moves across her face:

The ball of clay looked exactly the same as it had a minute ago. I would try, but it did not matter if I made a cup or not. The clay would be what it wanted to be. I wet my hands. I kicked the wheel, faster and faster. This time, in a few minutes, I had a cup growing between my fingertips. . . A caterpillar had escaped a fire and turned into a butterfly and my clay had become my first cup on a new wheel. Anything was possible (p. 94).

Elango, who learned his art from his grandfather, has a dream about a tall fiery horse roaming beneath the ocean, written about in Hindu scriptures. Though he struggles to make a living off his art, he devotes many hours to making this horse out of clay, which is to be a symbol of his love for Zohra, a young Muslim neighbor who lives with her blind grandfather, a calligrapher. The author describes the moment when Elango first sees his finished work:

The potter stood for a while, wordless from the wonderment of seeing his creation in its final form. Had he really made it? Could any human being have made it? Rearing out from the ashes, its eyes staring straight ahead as if they could see things beyond the earthly, the horse he had made seemed to him to be a divine being, He bowed his head to it as if it were a god, sent it a whispered prayer of gratitude for arriving intact on earth. He left only after the darkness had shrouded it (p. 131).

Tensions between the Hindu and Muslim neighbors are evident from the outset. A cricket match between India and Pakistan leads to a knife attack and arson, sending Muslims into hiding. This latter scene foreshadows the riot unleashed when Elango’s magnificent horse, which the Hindu community views as representative of one of their sacred traditions, is found to have been inscribed by the blind calligrapher with a poem in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.

A host of minor characters lend texture to the story, some more appealing than others. Sara’s friend at the university, Karin, enigmatically pops in and out of Sara’s life; her character might have warranted more development. Akka, the local fortune teller and caster of spells, and Taatha, a greedy landlord, join forces to get rid of Elango. Sara’s mother, a journalist, knows the secret of Chinna’s life prior to being found by Elango. But it is, perhaps, Sara’s father who influences her the most. Sara and her sister Tia grow up listening to their father reading aloud books about geology:

. . . his voice seeped into us, and his oddly soothing discourses on plate tectonics, much of which we did not understand, collected in me and Tia and shaped us in the way limestone forms unnoticed in warm and calm seawater from sediments of shells and algae that remain in it as fossils. We would fall asleep to the sound of plates diverging, converging, sliding past each other, in the process causing new mountains to rise, oceans to churn, and continents to form or rupture (p. 15).

When looking back on all the changes unleashed by Elango’s horse, the adult Sara thinks of her father: “My father would have said change is the work of the earth, spinning, spinning as it always had.” The Earth Spinner spins a tale well worth reading.

Fellowship Point (2022) - Alice Elliott Dark

Alice Elliott Dark is frequently asked, “Where is Fellowship Point? Fellowship Point is a real place, isn’t it?” The free fall readers do–into place, time and soulful, intricate characters in this novel–makes us believe that the title’s Maine peninsula truly exists. And that we would like to book a cottage there.

While the Point is the centerpiece of this quilted story, another important place for the main characters opens the novel—Philadelphia, in Agnes Lee’s apartment on Rittenhouse Square. It’s here that the two friends-since-birth, Agnes and Polly, decide they will block the proposed development of their beloved Fellowship Point. They feel strongly that if developed,

…the hallowed thirty-five-acre tip of the peninsula called the Sank (short for “sanctuary”) would become desecrated, and the bird species that had flourished there under the fellowship’s aegis for nearly a hundred and fifty years would scatter and potentially go extinct. Eagles’ nests, including a towering structure built by golden eagles, had been occupied uninterrupted for decades. The thought of yachts and condos displacing those priceless dwellings made Agnes’s heart literally hurt. She had to block the possibility if it was the last thing she did (p. 15).

Agnes and Polly are 80, so a “last thing” for the two main characters it could very well be.

However long it takes you to read this lengthy book, rest assured it will be a time of magical reading. Avid readers (devoted, reading deeply) and writers (or wannabes) will relish the fact that Agnes is a writer. And Dark takes the opportunity to reflect and write about the art and practice of writing (and reading) in a most extraordinary way.

Sitting alone at her desk, or on her chaise writing in her journal, she (Agnes) went deep into life. She felt vividly involved with the entire world when she was writing. Alone, literally, yet she was choosing words with the intention that they serve as stepping stones between herself and the mind and heart of another person. It was a miracle that this was possible. Small black marks on a page, a code called the alphabet, and she could read a story written hundred of years earlier, or write a book read thousands of miles away. Why get excited about gods and ghosts when writing and reading were so supernatural? (pp. 83-84)

You will spend many pages getting to know Agnes in all her caustic yet caring self-confidence. This woman, whom one can characterize as a nun who has taken the vow of writing, knows herself and sees others minutely and thoroughly. Dark has made Agnes compelling and attractive—in the non-superficial sense of the word. Alone by choice, early in her life, Agnes sheds her “proper” (and egotistical) fiancé, firmly believing “Marriage should be a long conversation leading to freedom” (p. 91).

If Agnes riles us up in the novel, Polly, her life-long friend-sister, soothes us. Indeed, Polly’s life’s mission has been soothing others, most notably her husband Dick. Early in their life together, when Polly senses she is pregnant for the first time, she tells Dick, “We’re not alone anymore.” He replies, “But I’ll always come first.” In five words, Dark paints Dick for us. The author continues: “She (Polly) should have heard in that remark a howl of storms on the way, but she only said, ‘Of course’” (141).

Throughout their marriage Polly bolsters Dick by reinforcing his sense of being an exceptional but overlooked philosophy professor. In contrast, Dick is dismissive of Polly’s gifts and intelligence, which Agnes can readily see. When Polly, in perinatal fullness–having just given birth to her 3rd son Theo–describes an idea that has come to her, Dick belittles her, saying, “Philosophical ideas are developed through work and thinking, not in dreams” (p. 149). At this point Polly has a “sudden comprehension of what Dick was like in the world: competitive, in a stealthy way; belittling of good ideas that weren’t his; suspicious” (151). Only after decades together, when Dick is dying, does he reveal himself to Polly–in the gloaming of early morning. Polly is grateful for his openness.

The novel’s many characters are drawn so well by Dark that we are sure we know them. The significant, albeit relatively fleeting, Virgil, and the librarian Karen. The developers: Hamm Loose, Jr. and sons. Robert Circumstance, the young, gentle and beloved gardener of Fellowship Point. (And oh, the correspondence between Robert and Polly during the two years of Robert’s wrongful imprisonment!) There’s Maud, the editor who seeks out Agnes and is her match. And Nan, who is the eponymous subject of Agnes’s successful young people’s book series and the MacGuffin for this novel. But better to meet them firsthand.

A writer writes, even to her dead sister; through letters from Agnes to her lost, beloved Elspeth, Dark fleshes out and advances the story. You can easily follow the major and minor plot lines of the novel. The desire of Agnes and Polly to protect and preserve the natural beauty of Fellowship Point (land once belonging to the Wabanaki) from the excavator threads through the entire novel.

Coincidences abound in the story, and these may be, for some, a bit too forced, but overall they don’t detract from the rich read given to us by Alice Elliott Dark. Nor do they deter us in our wish to walk the Sank, on Fellowship Point, with Agnes and Polly.

It’s a good thing Dark has written a long, old-fashioned book. Since we don’t want it to end, we have at least 576 pages before it does.

The Friend (2018) - Sigrid Nunez

A book about grief, loss, friendship and writing. At the center is Apollo, a Great Dane, who has lost its owner to suicide. The narrator, a close friend, colleague and one-time lover of the writer who has committed suicide, agrees to take care of the dog in spite of the challenges of having a very large dog in a very small NYC apartment. Through the narration of this very unlikely relationship between a magnificent canine and an unnamed heroine, the novel takes on the writing world—its competitiveness and loss of meaning—and the nature of love and grief for a man who, despite character flaws, remains the narrator’s friend throughout, as does Apollo, the Great Dane.

The narrator states that the dead, “dwell in the conditional tense of the unreal.” She also quotes Virginia Woolf about death: “the one experience I will never describe.”

And this from French philosopher, Simone Weill: “when you have to make a decision in life, do what will cost you the most.”

About her relationship with Apollo, the narrator writes: “two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other.”

Gilead (2005) - Marilynne Robinson

Gilead is the first of Marilynne Robinson’s quartet, which also includes Home, Lila and the recently published Jack. The story is written as a letter from Reverend John Ames to his young son as he shares memories of family, religion and life in a small town in Iowa in 1956. Reverend John Ames lost his first wife and a child many years prior to the narrative in this book, and after living alone for a long time, he now has a young wife, Lila, and a son, to whom he writes this letter.

John has lived 74 of his 76 years in this town and has been a faithful Congregational minister in the same church for many years. One of the important streams in the story is his long-time friendship with the Reverend John Boughton, the minister of the local Presbyterian church. Their relationship is profound but not without some of the strife that is felt in most deep relationships. The subject of the strife is John Boughton’s son Jack, who throughout the lives of both ministers, has created tremendous sadness and pain, testing John Ames’s faith in his ability to forgive and in humankind’s ability to be redeemed in this life.

We human beings do real harm. History could make a stone weep. I am aware that significant confusion enters my thinking at this point. I’m tired—that may be some part of the problem. Though I recall even in my prime foundering whenever I set the true gravity of sin over against the free grace of forgiveness…. But if [Jack] harmed you in the slightest way, I’m afraid theology would fail me (p. 190).
Sinners are not all dishonorable people, not by any means. But those who are dishonorable never really repent and never really reform. Now, I may be wrong here…. But in my experience, dishonor is recalcitrant. When I see it, my heart sinks, because I feel I have no help to offer a dishonorable person. I know the deficiency may be my own altogether (pp. 156-157).

Throughout the novel, Marilynne Robinson shares with the audience, through the voice of John Ames, her questions and convictions about father-son relationships and religion in today’s world. John opines on baptism, “There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is power in that.” (p 23). And when earlier in his life John had asked his father about baptizing cats, his father replied, “the Sacraments must always be treated and regarded with the greatest respect” (p. 22). John “got his meaning” and there was “no more baptizing till [he] was ordained” (p. 22).

On the existence of God and belief John writes,

In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. (p. 178).

When Jack decides to leave Gilead again, John reflects on the aging Boughton’s relationship with his son,

…if [Boughton] could stand up out of his chair, out of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, [he] would abandon all those handsome children of his...and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have….he would utterly pardon every transgression, past, present, and to come… (p.238).

Go, Went, Gone (2018) - Jenny Erpenbeck

Against the backdrop of Germany’s Nazi past looms the question of how the country will deal with its African refugees, who are fleeing war and poverty. Richard, a widower and newly retired professor who lives in the formerly Communist section of Berlin, confronts the refugee issue head on. Ashamed that “most of his lifetime he has taken the easy way out,” he becomes personally involved in the lives of several African men who are occupying a park near his home. As his relationships with these men deepen, Richard re-examines his own life through a new lens.

Richard knows he is one of very few people in this world who are in a position to take their pick of realities (p. 219).
How many times, he wonders, must a person learn everything he knows, rediscovering it over and over, and how many coverings must be torn away before he’s finally able to truly grasp things, to understand them to the bone? Is a human lifetime long enough? His lifetime or anyone else’s (p. 142)?

Awad, one of the refugees, explains to Richard,

When you become foreign, you don’t have a choice. You don’t know where to go. You don’t know anything. I can’t see myself anymore, can’t see the child I need to be. I don’t have a picture of myself anymore. My father is dead…And me — I don’t know who I am anymore (p.63).

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague (2021) - Maggie O’Farrell

I did not so much read this book as inhabit it. Maggie O’Farrell’s descriptive powers conjure up an enthralling view of familial and communal life in Shakespeare’s England, including an imaginative description of the origins and spread of the plague. Equally enthralling is her portrayal of the young bard and his wife, Agnes, who recognize and cherish each other’s exceptional natures and talents. Though they live apart most of the time, their strong bond survives even the greatest loss that parents can suffer. This poetic novel is worthy of its brilliant characters and tragic themes.

Shakespeare’s mother, Mary, distrusts her daughter-in-law, Agnes, a woman from the countryside, a woman whose mother lived at the edge of the mysterious and dreaded forest:

And what a forest it was. Dense, verdant, crazily cross-stitched with brambles and ivy, the trees so closely packed that there were whole swaths, it was said, that received no light at all. Not a place to get lost, then. There were paths that went around and back on themselves, paths that led travelers from their route, their intentions. Breezes that whipped up from nowhere. Certain clearings where you might hear music or whispers or murmurs of your name, saying, Here, come here, come this way (p. 29).

Mary describes Agnes:

Beautiful fingers, Agnes has, Mary is pained to notice. Tapering, white, slender. Agnes is, Mary is forced to admit, a striking woman. But it is an unsettling, wrong sort of beauty: the dark hair is ill-matched with the golden-green eyes, the skin whiter than milk, the teeth evenly spaced but pointed, like a fox’s. Mary finds she cannot look at her daughter-in-law for long, she cannot hold her gaze. This creature, this woman, this elf, this sorceress, this forest sprite—because she is that, everyone says so, Mary knows this to be true—bewitched and ensnared her boy, lured him into a union. This, Mary can never forgive (p. 174).

After the plague claims Shakespeare’s and Agnes’ son, Hamnet,

She (Agnes) cannot understand it. She, who can hear the dead, the unspoken, who can touch a person and listen to the creep of disease along the veins, can sense the dark velvet press of a tumor on a lung or a liver, can read a person’s eye and heart like some can read a book. She cannot find, cannot locate the spirit of her own child.
Judith (Hamnet’s twin sister), though, hears him in the swoosh of a broom against the floor. She sees him in the winged dip of a bird over the wall. She finds him in the shake of a pony’s mane, in the smattering of hail against the pane, in the wind reaching its arm down the chimney, in the rustle of the rushes that make up her den’s roof.
She says nothing, of course. She folds the knowledge into herself. She closes her eyes, allows herself to say silently, inside her mind, I see you, I hear you, where are you (p. 250)?

Agnes goes to London to search for her husband, the bard. She finds him at the playhouse:

He is standing…just behind the musicians’ gallery, at a small opening that gives out over the whole theatre… To him, it is the best place to be, before a performance: the stage below him, the audience filling the circular hollow in a steady trickle, and the other players behind him, transforming themselves from men to sprites or princes or soldiers or ladies or monsters. It is the only place to be alone in such a crowd. He feels like a bird, above the ground, resting on nothing but air…He cannot tell as he stands there, whether or not this new play is good…The play, the complete length of it, fills his head. It balances there, like a laden platter on a single fingertip. It moves through him—this one, more than any other he has ever written—as blood through his veins… (pp. 294-295).
Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can… (Her husband) has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place.' ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!’ murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live (p. 304).

Home Fire (2017) - Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie is a Pakistani-British author. Home Fire is Shamsie’s seventh novel. As this novel unfolds in today’s British-Muslim world, we recognize the emerging themes of love, betrayal and politics as played out in the Greek tragedy Antigone.

An older sister, Isma appears first as the strength and focus of the novel, looking for a life of her own after taking care of her family for many years. But Isma cannot stop worrying about her younger firebrand sister, Aneeka, and her twin brother, Parvaiz . And a twist, in the novel, has Aneeka, eventually playing the role of Antigone, trying to protect her twin brother at all costs.

Aneeka sees Eamon, the son of a powerful political figure, who first falls for Isma and then for Aneeka, as a pawn to help her brother. “I was with him because I thought he could help…Because I wanted him to want to do anything for me before I asked him to do something for my brother. Why should I admit it? What would you stop at to help the people you love the most?” (pp. 199-200 ).

The story develops into a tragic love story as well as an illumination of the religious and cultural entanglements, and grief of family and friends in today’s Muslim communities in the embrace of Anglo cultures.