Fiction: The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins by Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh is not an acquired taste. But no matter what he’s writing about, he is consistent. He draws his images and ideas with big, bold lines liberally lubricated with profanity. If you liked or loved Welsh’s previous dozen novels -- Trainspotting, Filth, Glue and Skagboys among them -- then you will also like The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins (Doubleday) which is as smart, dark and nasty as any of his previous novels.

Now all of that is a relief, actually. When I heard that The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins was set in America, I’d feared that, nearly two decades after Trainspotting, Welsh’s debut novel, the author might have mellowed. But fear not. Welsh is as sharply observational in his latest novel as he has been throughout his career. Only this time, Welsh brings his laser eye to Miami and tells a tale that is one part bizarre crime fiction, one part celebrity culture observation and one part pure new world madness.

A Miami Beach-based personal trainer disarms a gunman and, overnight, she is cast as a hero. But the “crazed gunman” turns out to have been the victim of child abuse and the men he was chasing are serial pedophiles. When one of the pedophiles attacks someone, the hero’s transformation to villain is complete

Welsh tells his story with his usual verve and dark humor, but his sharp observations on American culture create an almost transparent sub-plot and, in so many ways, it becomes quickly apparent that The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins might be Welsh's best book yet.

Fiction: Written in the Blood by Stephen Lloyd Jones

 When I read The String Diaries earlier this year, I was simply amazed. I’d expected a thriller. What I didn’t expect was something as exceptionally well-written. 

Stephen Lloyd Jones, a British marketing executive, has managed to create a tight, sometimes ultra-violent tale crafted with all the emotion and color of a heightened romance. And then I discovered Written in the Blood, the sequel. I started it with a certain apprehension. What I didn’t want was a sequel written for the sake of writing a sequel: a retread; a bland reimagining of the first. What I got was none of those things. Far from a drab retread, Written in the Blood is bloody brilliant, a furthering of the original, an enhancement written with the same keen attention to an endless series of gorgeous details.

Lloyd Jones loves color and texture and subtlety. He loves tingling the reader’s senses in the most extraordinary way. Blood gives him all the chances to tingle them that Diaries did, except that now he has his heroines are losing even more -- which, given the losses in the first book, is saying something.

One of them travels far and wide this time, feeding the author’s imagination as much as the reader’s. The two books are complex tales of love, heartbreak, and revenge that traverse generations. There’s a secret society, and more than a little malevolence in some characters’ ability to transform their bodies to look like other people. One of these shape-shifters, Jacab, drives the action as he searches across time and geography for both love and vengeance, and the young woman he’s after, Leah, can almost smell him getting closer and closer. So can we. This elaborate cat and mouse game is wonderfully realized and hits almost every note perfectly and never disappoints. Lloyd Jones leads the reader into his characters’ minds and memories and even their eyes, with descriptions so glorious that they’re sometimes gasp-inducing.

With equal exuberance, he paints lovely internal narratives and external worlds, and the story happens where the two intersect. On nearly every page of both of these novels, I was touched deeply by the key relationship that is their true link: the one between novelist and novel. Truly, The String Diaries and Written in the Blood comprise a love story between the man and his words. ◊

Fiction: The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson

True charm and genuine innovation mark the debut novel of Pushcart Prize-winning author, Cynthia Swanson.

In Sliding Doors style, The Bookseller (Harper) tells the twinned stories of two women in the early 1960s. In 1962 Denver, 38-year-old Kitty Miller lives an austere life. By day she runs a bookshop with her best friend. By night the unmarried bookseller mostly hangs out with her cat and reads.

In 1963 Denver, Katharyn Andersson is the wife of Lars, the man of her dreams. Their life is perfect and looks exactly like the life Kitty once dreamed of for herself. The catch? Katharyn’s life only exists in Kitty’s dreams.

And Kitty has dreamed a beautiful, seductive place. The more time she spends there, the more the lines between fantasy and reality begin to fade.

Swanson writes beautifully, compellingly and we want to stick with Kitty to find out where this all will end. Sadly, that ending doesn’t deliver the surprise one might have hoped, for this reader anyway. That doesn’t stop me from recommending The Bookseller, and highly. I anticipate that Swanson’s debut will be one of my reading highlights for 2015.

Fiction: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

If Kazuo Ishiguro is to be believed, he is way past his prime. In a London Telegraph article last autumn, he was quoted as saying he thinks novelists peak in their late 30s and early 40s. “It’s rather like footballers,” he said. “Although novelists peak three or four years after footballers.”

One wonders why, if he really thinks this is so, he would, at 60, publish the novel that seems likely to be remembered as his most ambitious to date.

The Buried Giant (Knopf) is so outside what we understood to be Ishiguro’s oeuvre, it’s been easy for some fans to shake their heads in wonder, while others wring their hands in consternation and still others (an apparent minority) feel this is the best thing Ishiguro has produced.

And me? I’m on the fence a little bit. To be honest, I found aspects of The Buried Giant, Ishiguro’s crack at Arthurian England, to be a bit of a slog. But weeks after reading, aspects and images hang with me. The very best fiction does that, doesn’t it? (That’s what I tell myself.) You don’t always “get” it while you’re reading, but months and years later pieces/passages/images hang with you, having perhaps somehow impregnated themselves in your mind. I suspect that will be the case with The Buried Giant, a book that somehow seems better with the last page turned than it did while reading.

So what’s the hold up? In the first place, it’s very different than the Ishiguro we know and love. Light years, in its own way, from Never Let Me Go and Remains of the Day, for which he won the Booker (when he was just 35. Big surprise). And this is not a condemnation, but it has been ten years since his last novel was published. We’ve been waiting a long time. Now… this?

And yet, in some ways, this astonishing work of fantasy truly is Ishiguro’s most audacious -- and ambitious -- novel to date. He has created a classic fantasy journey that brims with messages and memos for our own times.

The Buried Giant is a tapestry: carefully woven, beautifully wrought. One can barely imagine a 35-year-old writer wrapping his mind around it. But the mature Ishiguro has given us one for the ages. Don’t plan on a fast read. This is one you’ll be chewing on for a while.

January Magazine’s 2000 interview with the author is here. ◊


Linda L. Richards is editor of January Magazine and the author of several books.

Harper Lee’s New Cover Revealed

People magazine today revealed the cover of Harper Lee’s new novel, Go Set a Watchman. It is the author’s second novel, the first since the publication of her debut, To Kill a Mockingbird, in 1960. From People:

Publisher HarperCollins, planning for a hit, will print two million copies for the book's July 14 publication date, a spokeswoman tells PEOPLE. 

HarperCollins president Michael Morrison says the book jacket was meant to evoke Mockingbird's now-iconic look: "It draws on the style of the decade the book was written." 

You can see the full piece here. We’ve previously written about Go Set a Watchman here and here.

Anniversary Edition: Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

“The girl she said, I didn’t tell you this because it was a small thing, but little girls, they leave their hearts at home when they walk outside. Hearts are so precious. They don’t want to lose them.”

Breath, Eyes, Memory was Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat’s debut, the book that made readers and reviewers instantly sit up and pay attention: here was a writer to watch out for.

Published in 1994, it is the story of Sophie Caco as we follow her from her native Haiti at 12 to the inevitable culture shock that New York City will be.

The 20th anniversary edition from Soho Press includes an essay about the book by the author as well as an interview with her. The insights Danticat provides in both forums add a depth to an already wonderful book.

“First novels are a lot like first children,” Danticat writes in the afterword. “You lavish all your love and attention on them, but you also make all your rookie mistake on them. First novels teach you how to write.”

And it’s true: Danticat’s novels have become progressively more luminous, sharper, perhaps better defined. But this first? Was pure love, pure raw pain. And it is still so very beautiful. ◊

Fiction: Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar

A beautiful moment in history is brought to life in Vanessa and Her Sister (Ballantine) with a correspondence between an as-yet-unknown group of young artist and writers who despair of ever amounting to anything. The title’s Vanessa is the painter Vanessa Bell, sister to theVirginia who would later become Woolf. Their friends include an as-yet-unpublished E.M Forster and Lytton Strachey. John Maynard Keynes is job hunting.

Here we have a fictional reworking of what-might-have-beens. An imaginative collection of notes, journal entries, postcards, letters, telegraphs, epiphanies and dreams, all wrought by the hand of Priya Parmar (Exit the Actress), who seems here to magically revisit history on our behalf, concocting a delicious and imaginative quilt from a time long past filled with names we know well.

Though the group of friends is endearingly wrought, the focus is on the sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, here coming into their maturity with alarming results. As Vanessa falls in love and pulls away into her own life, Virginia feels abandonment and a despair that at times borders on madness.

Vanessa and Her Sister is memorable and unique. Though the work is fiction, it leaves us feeling like we know a bit more about the secretive story between these dynamic sisters. ◊

New This Week: The Dress Shop of Dreams by Menna van Pragg

Menna van Praag’s highly anticipated second novel (after 2013’s The House at the End of Hope Street) delights with elements of fantasy, fairy tale and magical realism. Beautifully written and vibrantly shared, it’s a tough tale not to fall in love with.

Cora Sparks, a scientist, lost her parents under mysterious circumstances many years ago. Since then, Cora has immersed herself in her work and in the corners of her grandmother Etta’s dress shop. What Cora doesn’t know -- though we all suspect -- is that one should never underestimate the power of a good dress. And there is magic waiting in the shop’s corners that will help her realize all of her dreams: even the most important ones.

Make no mistake, The Dress Shop of Dreams (Ballantine) is a classic love story, but the well applied tastes of magic and fairytales bring the tale to a different level. Menna van Praag knows how to tell a story. And she does it with charm and even panache. The Dress Shop of Dreams is just the right tale with which to begin a fantastic new year of reading. ◊

Fiction: Prince Lestat by Anne Rice

No one does what Anne Rice does.

In 1976, she kickstarted what would become today’s vampire craze. Thank her for Sookie and Edward and Bella and all that. Anne Rice made blood sucking chic, fun, and tantalizing. She dusted off Dracula’s tropes, trashed his tux, tossed the mythology and the rules, and reinvented a genre, inspired by the death of her young daughter and her own thirst for telling a great story.

That first novel, Interview with the Vampire, was the story of the vampire Louis and his maker, the monstrous vampire Lestat, a French nobleman. Back in 18th century New Orleans, they fed at night and created (and later lost) a so-called daughter, Claudia. Along the way we met a few of their vampire brothers (and some sisters) as Rice began to build her world of darkness.

Interview was followed up, nine years later, by The Vampire Lestat. All by itself, that book started what Rice has built on since, relentlessly, creatively, and with a unique quality that no one seems to focus on. Lestat, you see, read Interview and hated it. Furious that Louis dared to reveal the world of the vampires to the reading public via that extended interview, Lestat set about to tell his own tale, his own way.

The linked novels The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned were Lestat’s response to what Louis started. And now, all these years later, Lestat has returned to pick up the tale again in Prince Lestat (Knopf).

The time is now. The vampire world is fractured. A mysterious voice is speaking telepathically to vampires the world over, and covens and their denizens are being burned. Whole vampire communities wiped out. What to do? Who can save the day? Guess.

Unlike Lestat’s earlier works, Prince Lestat is not simply a first-person account of what happens next. Instead, Rice has woven together sections Lestat narrates on his own with third-person accounts of other vampires’ experiences. Some half dozen others appear here in a story that picks up Rice’s finest, oldest threads.

Lestat started all this ruckus, became the so-called Brat Prince and ruled as a rock star, and now that their world is threatened, he has to fix it. Here’s the thing, though: The vampires here have read all the other books -- Louis’s book and Lestat’s books -- not just the first three but probably all the others, too, which are not mentioned in this one. My point is that Rice didn’t just reinvent the vampire; she also created a new world that exists both within and apart from ours, a world in which her own books figure prominently as narrative devices, as motivating factors, as touchstones. Not only does she find ways -- brilliant ways -- to tease new narrative potential from old stories, she does so while also acknowledging that those stories are already part of the other characters’ psyches. I don’t know of any other novelist doing that. Rather than plucky self-promotion, this is of a higher order. What we read as novels, they read as their leader’s autobiographies. Our fiction is their non-fiction.

And then there’s Rice’s way with words. Some may complain that she overdoes it, but I won’t be among them. She has not lost any of her flair for description, allowing us to experience the world the way her vampires do, with the sensory volume turned up to 11. Her vampires dip into the culture we ourselves are living in right now. They marvel at iPhones, they explore using the Internet, and one of them even has an Internet radio show that he uses to communicate with vampires all around the world. But for all this, they hear and see and taste with an accuracy and a beauty that we can only dream of. They experience their world -- our world -- in ways we don’t. They see more and hear more. They’re in touch with it all. They make being a vampire look fun, sexy, and irresistible.

Rice wants us to feel through Lestat, to learn what it feels like to drink, to soar, to see color and feel heat as he does. He and the others thirst, love, and lose just as we do, and their bodies flood not just with blood, but also exhilaration, heartbreak, and triumph. All of it is rendered in such a way that brings every moment a certain gravitas. You get the sense that something massive is taking shape. I don’t think it’s there yet, but it’s coming. Because while science fiction is a commentary on our society, Anne Rice’s vampires are a commentary on us. ◊

Of Brothers and Big Shots, Crime and Coney

Like many readers, I expect, I first heard of Kevin Baker following the publication of his 1998 novel, Dreamland. That book, set in New York City in 1910, was “a wild amusement-park ride on a continuous loop,” to quote from Thomas Mallon’s review in The New York Times. Dreamland, he continued, “is historical fiction at its most entertaining and, in a number of spots, most high-handed.” Kirkus Reviews, meanwhile, focused on the book’s “generous display” of historical detail:

The various facets of New York and Coney Island, where the ornate park of the title is located, are scribed in intimate detail: the notorious jail The Tombs, City Hall, the Triangle garment factory, immigrant housing, whiskey bars, and strip joints, all are nicely animated. Meanwhile, dozens of characters stroll through these various locales: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung visit New York and observe the vulgarity of America; Trick the Dwarf tells of the bizarre and the humane at Dreamland -- the dwarfs and the bearded ladies -- which is the most familiar world he knows; and Esther, a garment worker alienated from her immigrant family, takes an active role in the labor movement. Also on hand are Gyp the Blood, a small-time criminal; Big Tim, the Tammany politico, plus Kid Twist and Sadie and Clara.

Before it was engulfed by flames in 1911, Dreamland was one of Coney Island’s most grandiose, and in some ways most eccentric, public entertainments. Baker’s own Dreamland was hardly less ambitious, and made me hungry for more of his work. Fortunately, the author has satisfied my appetite on a fairly regular basis ever since, releasing Paradise Alley in 2002, Strivers Row (featuring a fictionalized Malcolm X) in 2006 and, in 2013, The Big Crowd -- which was finally issued in paperback this fall.

A fairly exceptional New York history blog called The Bowery Boys explains that The Big Crowd turns on the mystery of the 1941 “suicide” of Abe Reles, aka Kid Twist, a successful mob hit man who died, tumbling from a hotel room window, while in police custody -- and in the midst of testifying against some of the city’s most notorious gangsters. However, the emotional center of The Big Crowd is largely dominated by Charlie O’Kane, a bigger-than-life character based openly on William O’Dwyer, a former district attorney who won national celebrity through his prosecution of organized-crime figures, and was elected in 1946 as New York City’s 100th mayor -- only to later be brought down by controversy having to do with police corruption.

The Bowery Boys opines that “while their biographies are nearly the same … O’Kane is a lustier, more mysterious figure, escaping America and becoming an almost godlike figure [and a U.S. ambassador] in Mexico City.” It’s to Mexico, then, that Charlie’s much-younger brother, Tom, with the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, goes in the early 1950s to ask the former mayor questions about his possible involvement in Reles’ demise. His hope is to stand up for this brother he once idolized and clear Charlie of wrongdoing. But Baker’s yarn offers no such easy satisfactions. What he finds in Mexico City is a sibling trying to put his best face forward, but haunted by the troubles and compromises of his past. Charlie is also contending with an estranged and headstrong second wife, Slim Sadler -- a quondam model increasingly dissatisfied with her Mexican exile -- for whom Tom O’Kane has long had feelings, but who’s presently carrying on too publicly with a matador. Reviewing The Big Crowd for The New York Times, author Scott Turow pointed out that “All the O’Kanes -- Charlie and Tom and even Slim -- are patterned after real people: the former New York mayor William O’Dwyer; the fashion model he married while in office, Sloan [or Sloane] Simpson; and O’Dwyer’s brother, Paul, an activist lawyer who was once elected City Council president. Baker is clearly trying to unravel the enigma of how a figure like William O’Dwyer could fly into office on the wings of hope only to find himself sunk in scandal.”

(Left) Author Kevin Baker.
(Photograph by Nina Subin.)

Accomplishing that task leads Baker to skip about through the early 20th century, and across borders, as he retraces Charlie O’Kane’s rise to power, the uneasy relationships he establishes with powerful and corrupting figures in New York City, the costs of his ambition and the depths of treachery to which some people will sink to exploit his weaknesses.

I had the opportunity recently to address questions, via e-mail, to Kevin Baker about his latest novel, and didn’t hesitate to take it. We discussed his interests in historical fiction, the rich immigrant story of William O’Dwyer and his brother, crime and social optimism in post-World War II Manhattan, and a great deal more.

J. Kingston Pierce: You weren’t born in New York City, but rather in New Jersey. Yet after attending Columbia University there, you never left. Was there something about old Gotham that made it easier for you to imagine your future there than anyplace else?

Kevin Baker: Actually, it was much more the New York of the time, 1970s New York, that drew me. The city had many problems then, but it was also a very exciting, vibrant place to be; a very cheap place for an aspiring writer or artist to live.

I had ties to the city already. My mother was born in Washington Heights, my father on Fordham Road. I had some idea of what it was like already, and I couldn’t wait to go live there.

The love of its history only came later, as I began to know, and wonder how it had come to be what it was.

JKP: Your official bios all seem to leave a huge gap between your earning a degree in political science and your becoming a novelist. Can you briefly explain what happened during those “lost years”? Did you ever use that political science degree?

KB: Hardly! Columbia was (and is) a great, great school. Going there was one of the best decisions I ever made, but I regret that poli sci degree. I would have been better off, I think, majoring in straight-out history, or English. But thanks in part to the college’s core curriculum, I was exposed to any number of great thinkers and writers I had no inkling of when I went there as an 18-year-old -- which is why the core is so important.

No, the “gap” just reflects my doing whatever sort of work I could -- largely freelance writing, copy-editing, proofreading -- while I tried to write and sell fiction. I began writing five pages a day on a novel the week I started college, thinking I would surely publish my first book before I graduated. Instead, it took me 15 years before I sold a lick of it!

JKP: I’m not sure that E.L. Doctorow opened up these floodgates with Ragtime (1975), but there are certainly many historical novels nowadays featuring real-life characters in either starring or secondary roles. Do you think this is a valuable trend? And are there risks that novelists run in featuring historical figures in their fiction?

KB: That’s a very good point, I think Doctorow did indeed open up the floodgates with Ragtime. He’s really been the father of modern historical fiction, I think. One thing I love about his take on the genre is that he’s completely unapologetic about any of it. He feels the fiction writer should write about whatever he pleases, and I think he’s right about that.

This gets back to the whole argument over just what “historical fiction” is, and I think we’re very wrong to separate it, and ghettoize it as we do in this country. It’s just as legitimate as any other form of fiction, and in fact through much of history it’s been the dominant form of fiction.

The ancient Greeks didn’t keep writing about, say, Odysseus, as “historical fiction,” the Romans didn’t write about Aeneas as historical fiction. These were central, founding myths of their societies, and assessing them, and reassessing them was a critical element in how they debated what their society was, and what it should be.

Sure, the genre’s been mightily abused over the years through bodice rippers, and bad detective stories, and hero-worshipping … but what form of literature hasn’t been? Why shouldn’t we be able to write stories about prominent, or simply intriguing, public figures of the past?

Naturally, one needs to think it out, because as the famous L.P. Hartley quote goes, the past’s another country, they do things differently there. I would never have a real-life figure saying or doing something in opposition to all that we know about him, or get too far off in flights of fancy about what he might do.

But then, we all paint from life. Why is it legitimate to, say, write a contemporary novel based on one’s father, but not to write a historical novel based on a founding father?

JKP: There’s always a tendency, when writing a novel based on extensive research, to include as much of that research as possible in the finished product. How do you combat such a tendency in your own fiction-writing?

KB: I don’t combat it very well! I find that’s always difficult -- and I think that’s where Mr. Doctorow and I differ in our approaches. I was told by one of his former students that he advises, “Do as little research as you can get away with,” when writing historical fiction, and certainly that works for him.

For me, I find it’s always the things I wasn’t looking for that say so much, and that’s why I’m happy to do so much research. For instance, in this case I had no idea that Sloane Simpson, the real-life second wife of William O’Dwyer, actually learned how to bullfight while they were in Mexico.

Or the whole story of William McCormack, the “Mr. Big” in the book. He was a fascinating individual, and he wielded enormous power in New York, controlling the largest port in the world with an iron fist. But he was virtually unknown by the public in his own time, and is pretty much forgotten today.

Characters and details like that are not something you even necessarily know are out there when you start, and they become vital to the work. They not only tell you so much about a time and place, they also fill in all the gaps, and complete the puzzle of your characters.

But I do tend to get carried away with it, which is where I have to fight myself. And fortunately, I’ve always had terrific editors to help me, in this case Andrea Schulz and Nicole Angeloro, at Houghton Mifflin.

JKP: So let’s talk about Mayor O’Dwyer. When did you first become interested in his checkered career? And what was it you found most interesting about him?

KB: I first became interested in him when I discovered, many years ago, that he was the (much) older brother of Paul O’Dwyer, who was such a political icon in New York for so many years: the last fighting liberal, always taking on one cause or another, no matter what the odds.

(Left) Mayor William O’Dwyer

And when I learned that William O’Dwyer had more or less had to live in Mexico in exile for years, I thought how can it be that Paul had this disgraced older brother? Accused of some very serious things -- of having helped to kill probably the greatest mob witness of all time; of being a tool of the mob, of the political machines when they were at their most venal and corrupt. What sort of conflicts must there have been there?

I went into this initially to tell a story of two brothers. The fact that the real-life Paul O’Dwyer would never say a word against his brother in public, always maintained his innocence, only whetted my appetite.

What I found most interesting about William O’Dwyer was that he has this great immigrant story behind him, somebody who came here as a seminary dropout with no money, worked his way up as a hod carrier, a cop on the beat. Went to law school at night, became a district attorney, even a war hero. He comes back from World War II and gets elected mayor, marries the hottest fashion model in the country after his wife dies … and then it all unravels.

It’s the classic immigrant story -- all gone wrong.

JKP: Has this novel made you reassess your views on O’Dwyer?

KB: He was much deeper, much harder to read than I imagined. It was not so much that he was a deeply complicated man -- because he wasn’t -- but that he did a great deal of dissembling throughout his life. You peel back layer after layer, but he remains evasive, and I suspect he did even to those closest to him.

There is, I would say, something ultimately false about the man. Something slightly fabricated. One of the themes I tried to get across in the book is that he almost seemed like a cinematic creation -- a sort of cardboard cutout of the crusading D.A., the all-American boy, the immigrant boy made good.

And yet, under any close examination, it all crumbles away. He was constantly erecting façades of himself, I think, to shield his real self from the public, from the people closest to him, his wife and his brothers, and I think in the end he may have believed in those make-believe O’Dwyers himself.

JKP: You brought up “the classic immigrant story.” Because New York was very much a city of immigrants, you’ve touched on that experience in all your novels set there, I think. But The Big Crowd really exploits the subject. How did you intend to use the history of immigration as a theme in exploring New York City’s mid-20th-century development?

KB: Well, it’s somewhat different from the earlier, 19th-century waves of immigration, because now the Irish, especially, have a solid foothold on the city.

Previously, in books like Paradise Alley and Dreamland, I was writing about how Irish and Jewish immigrants came here and had to really fight their way up with nothing. By the time Charlie O’Kane gets here, a few years before World War I, there’s already a power structure, there are very strong Irish political machines in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx.

He has to sort of plug himself into it -- which is no easy thing, but not quite the life-or-death struggle being an immigrant was.

Yet at the same time, it’s a moment when the old Irish-dominated machines were fading. They had been what [W.E.B.] Du Bois calls “folkways,” means to help the Irish survive, and fight their way into the power structure of this country.

But as Charlie comes to power himself, the machines are losing their reason for being. The country’s gotten rich, there’s more opportunity, there’s a social welfare state in place. People can go to college, they have Social Security, they don’t need the machine to get them a job, or give them the proverbial turkey on Christmas.

Now, all the other immigrants want in, as well. New York by this time is no longer a city that can just be run by a few men in a room, and it never will be again. It can no longer be run just on some understanding between a few powerful politicians and businessmen, maybe a mob boss or two.

We’re all Americans now -- and everybody wants in.

JKP: As you said before, this is very much a novel about brothers, two quite different people with different approaches to life, who wind up supporting and disappointing each other. What was it about the relationship between Tom and Charlie O’Kane that you found most curious or illuminating? And did the story of these brothers unroll differently, during the course of your writing, than you’d originally expected it would?

KB: It was somewhat more complicated than I had originally envisioned -- which I think is good.

I think a lot of the dialogue they’re having is about what it means to be a moral person. How do you get the power to do anyone any good, without first getting corrupted? What do you owe to your family and friends, and what do you owe to the people all around you, to the city in general?

Tom is much more the idealist, at least at first, and Charlie is trying to show him practical ways to get power, and to do good with it. But you know, it’s so easy after awhile to confuse what you’re doing for the people, and what you’re doing for yourself.

JKP: What do you see as the role of Slim Sadler in this novel?

KB: Slim is based closely on Sloane Simpson, who was a fascinating individual, somebody who came from old money and very high society. Her father was a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt, one of her mother’s family was a Founding Father, they had cattle empires, and banking empires.

But then her father lost all his money, and she had to go make a living as a model. And she was very good at it, she was considered a great actress on the runway. She moved in very high circles in New York society, and really loved that life.

She was 23 years younger than O’Dwyer when they met, and she became his second wife, with all of the complications that such circumstances usually entail. She was always flirtatious, and gregarious, and he was very jealous, and that just aggravated everything.

(Right) Sloane Simpson in Life,
May 29, 1950

Then, down in Mexico, she was very unhappy in this sort of straitened, exiles’ existence they were living. She loved the country, and she loved the culture, but she couldn’t stand being boxed up with this jealous, bitter old man, and she started acting out -- learning to bullfight, having affairs.

The real Sloane did not do all the things I have the fictional Slim Sadler doing in the novel, which I feel a little bad about because I really liked the real Sloane. She sounds like she was a remarkable person, a real fighter and a hell of a lot of fun. But she said about herself, “I’ve had the morals of an alley cat” -- she really did have a penchant for getting into trouble.

I think what she represented to William O’Dwyer, and to both O’Kane brothers in the book, was the promise of America. She was the golden girl, from money and position, and to get her was to attain the dream.

But then of course, when you do get her, you find out the dream’s not all it’s cracked up to be, and it’s a bit of a lie, and all you can do is worry about losing it.

JKP: The Big Crowd makes postwar New York seem like a particularly optimistic place. Or is that your romantic side coming through?

KB: Oh, I think it was a very optimistic place! You have to understand, New York was the only great world city that had not been bombed or occupied during the war. It had emerged, almost overnight, as the leading city on the world scene, replacing the old European capitals as the leader in art, and literature, and fashion.

It was absolutely dominant economically -- far and away the world’s leading financial center, the country’s largest wholesale and retail center, with over a million manufacturing jobs still. Something like 40 percent of the nation’s commerce came through its port. It had easily the highest buildings in the world, the largest population of any city, anywhere.

It was incredibly vibrant, incredibly exciting -- and incredibly cheap. It was still a great middle-class and working-class town, where you didn’t have to have a lot of money to experience all sorts of things: go hear the best jazz in the world, see some of the greatest art -- watch Willie Mays play baseball.

That scene I have in the book, where Toots Shor, the legendary saloonkeeper, walks arm-in-arm down the middle of his restaurant one night with Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey on one arm, and Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby on the other, that really happened. And Toots Shor’s was not some exclusive nightclub, it was where pretty much anyone could go, and did, and I think it was extremely exciting for people to be in the middle of this, and see everything that was going on.

At the same time, there were still people who were excluded from the big party, still restrictions on all sorts of people, that would have to be addressed. Black people still weren’t allowed into most of the leading hotels and restaurants, women were still second-class citizens, gays and lesbians were still outcasts. Columbia, like all the Ivy League schools, had quotas limiting how many Jews could be admitted. Italian-Americans, such a young Mario Cuomo, could not get an interview with white-shoe law firms.

So there was all that which needed to be dealt with, and there were fissures of corruption spreading all underneath this lovely structure. And the men at the top were still refusing to deal with it, still clinging to their own power, and enriching themselves.

JKP: At the same time as this is a book about siblings, and politics, and familial relationships, it’s a story about urban crime. Were there depths or misconceptions of the New York underworld of that period that you were hoping to address?

KB: The misconception about organized crime is that it’s generally not that organized, or as powerful as people make it out to be. But this was the period when the crime families in New York had more political influence than they ever had before, or ever would again.

Historically, gangsters had been controlled and used by the politicians in New York. But with Prohibition, the mob made so much money that, once [Mayor Fiorello] La Guardia left office [in 1945], they were all set up to turn the tables. Now, it was the gangsters who provided the money that kept Tammany Hall going, and they called the shots.

This didn’t last, and in a place the size of New York City there are always competing, countervailing political forces and influences. But while it did, the criminals did tremendous, long-term economic damage to the city. For instance, they really brutalized and impoverished the tens of thousands of men who worked on the waterfront, and they stole so much that they pretty much wrecked the old port.

JKP: As someone who loved Dreamland, I was delighted to see the character of Kid Twist pop up again in The Big Crowd. But this isn’t the adult version of that criminal tyke from Dreamland, is it?

KB:Thank you! But no, this is not the same Kid Twist.

It was the longtime habit of New York gangsters to “honor” one another by taking on the name of some particularly famous, dead mobster. Hence, Arthur Flegenheimer was rechristened “Dutch Schultz” after a previous thug.

There were, incredibly enough, two Kid Twists, and they both met their end on Coney Island.

JKP: The “Kid Twist” in The Big Crowd is, in fact, Abe Reles, a mob enforcer who eventually became a government witness against Murder, Inc. and died mysteriously in a fall from the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island. Despite a grand jury concluding that Reles had perished accidentally, there seems every reason to believe that he was murdered by his former gangland pals. From your research, what do you think happened to Abe Reles?

KB: Oh, I think he was definitely pushed! The idea that he was trying to escape, or play some prank, as the police speculated at the time, is just ludicrous. Reles was a seriously ill man, and he was desperately afraid for his life. There is no way that he was trying to lower himself down from a ninth-story window on a set of tied-up bed sheets -- something I make plain in the novel.

He was a terrible little man, a top assassin for Murder, Inc., the legendary Brooklyn mob, who was thought to have killed over 60 men during his career.

Murder, Inc. was a sort of early triumph of niche marketing in the underworld. These were gangsters, Jewish and Italian, who hired themselves out to do hits for bigger mobs, all over the country. The advantage of this was that the target, especially in another city, would never see you coming.

They were truly ruthless, horrible men. But they were very much small-fry -- just low-life killers. O’Dwyer, as D.A. of Brooklyn, broke them up. Thanks to Reles, the most successful mob witness in history, he sent seven members of Murder, Inc. to “the Dance Hall” -- the electric chair -- up at Sing Sing, including “Lepke” Buchalter, to this day the only mob leader ever executed in the United States.

Reles gives invaluable testimony against these individuals, his old friends, and clears up dozens of murder cases around the country. But then, just as he’s about to testify against Albert Anastasia, who really is a big deal, the muscle William McCormack uses to control the longshoremen’s union and thereby the Port of New York … out the window Reles goes. Despite the fact that he was being held in a wing of the Half Moon Hotel, out on Coney Island, with a 17-man, ’round-the-clock police guard, behind an iron door.

As everyone wanted to know at the time, how could this have happened? Who did it? Was it crooked cops? The other four mob witnesses Reles was being held at the Half Moon with? Who ordered it? The mob? McCormack? O’Dwyer?

Again, there’s something very phony about everyone’s role, all through it. This case became the heart of the Kefauver Hearings, the first, televised corruption hearings in history, and they held Americans riveted to their brand-new television sets -- and helped wreck O’Dwyer’s reputation.

Was he involved? Who did it? It’s the greatest mystery in the annals of the mob.

I offer a solution that is very closely based on the real facts of the case and, I think, holds up pretty well. Read it and find out!

JKP: I know you’re penning fiction here, but is it really credible that a district attorney would assign Tom O’Kane to investigate his own brother in relation to Reles’ “suicide”?

KB: Yes, that does strain credulity, I’ll admit. But I wanted Tom to have some real power over his brother, maybe even life-or-death, in this matter. I wanted the stakes to matter.

And, I wanted to introduce the legendary Manhattan D.A. of the time, Frank Hogan. I see this book as the first of a planned “City of Gold” trilogy focusing on New York in the 1950s, with Tom investigating three of its iconic scandals: the Reles murder and waterfront corruption; college basketball point-shaving cases; and the quiz show fix.

JKP: I have to admit, as I was reading The Big Crowd I kept remembering Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Is Charlie O’Kane your Willie Stark?

KB: Thank you, that’s a tremendous compliment! But where Penn’s Willie Stark, being based on Huey Long, is much more a force of nature, someone whose ambition and ruthlessness puts him on a fatal course, Charlie O’Kane is much more a hesitant character, a man whose fears about the terrible nature of the world as he saw it in the Depression and World War II, whose self-doubts and whose vanity leaves him prey to being manipulated by more pitiless, determined men.

JKP: I was intrigued to see, in a short post you put together for the blog My Book, the Movie, that you’d like to see Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston in the role of Charlie O’Kane. That would be wonderful casting, I agree. But have you actually seen any Hollywood interest in The Big Crowd? Have filmmakers taken much of an interest in your previous books?

KB: I think Bryan Cranston could play anything, and particularly a politician, after seeing him not only in Breaking Bad, but also in that wonderful Robert Schenkkan play about LBJ, All the Way.

I haven’t heard much about [Hollywood interest in] The Big Crowd yet, just a few murmurings. I’ve had some more serious bites regarding Dreamland. But in general, I’d say all my books would be better as TV shows than movies, because they take place over time, and they’re pretty intense investigations of specific times, and conflicts, and crimes. And I’d be fine with that, I love what’s going on with TV right now.

JKP: What other novels do you think do an especially fine job of illuminating New York City’s history?

KB: Oh, there are so many! My favorite Doctorow is World’s Fair, although I also loved The Waterworks and Billy Bathgate. Peter Quinn wrote a great novel about the draft riots, Banished Children of Eve, that everyone should read. I greatly enjoyed the old Louis Auchincloss novel The Embezzler. I’m sure I’m forgetting some great ones …

JKP: And I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask: What are you writing next?

KB: Right now, I’m finishing up a history of New York City baseball, tentatively entitled The New York Game, for Pantheon, which has been very patient about it. Then, I’m writing a history of the United States between the world wars, for Houghton Mifflin, so it’s real segues into non-fiction for a time.

But I have many more novel ideas, a couple of which I noted above, and I suspect I’ll be returning constantly to New York and its past.

ALSO CHECK OUT: A video profile of Mayor William O’Dwyer.

New This Week: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

I wonder if David Mitchell likes the fact that when he publishes a novel, it’s an event. I mean, suddenly everyone is talking about his work. Everyone is either full-on loving it or not getting it at all. If I think about the rush for advance copies last June, when Random House gave away a few hundred copies of his new novel, The Bone Clocks, it’s probably a good indicator of the pandemonium that’s just ensuing now that the book has hit the shelves.

The Bone Clocks is a book about family, seen mostly through the life-lens of a girl named Holly Sykes. Holly is a force of nature. In its most basic terms, this novel is the story of her life, told in six big sections -- each a novella on its own. Holly narrates the first and the sixth, and the others are handled by people whose lives intersect hers at critical moments for both her and the novel’s development.

Mitchell, true to form, has folded in the normalcy of Holly’s life -- and really, the normalcy of all his characters’ lives, even if for them normal isn’t what it is for us. Conquests of success, sex, an advantage, an explanation, true love. His characters are after all sorts of things, but it’s Holly’s own search for meaning that drives this book -- and her life -- forward. In that sense, she’s everywoman. We learn about her escapades as a teenager, the disappearance of her brother, her experiences with mystical beings she doesn’t understand, and the success and notoriety she earns after she writes a book about the voices she hears in her head. And about those voices: They provide the entrée into the novel’s deeper layer, about an occult war between mystical beings who hold the keys to immortality.

As he did with Cloud Atlas, Mitchell assembles his story in multiple layers. There’s what we read about, what’s going on day to day -- and then there’s what really going on, the stuff of year to year and lifetime to lifetime. This layer illuminates a new set of characters and provides more information about what motivates the characters we already know. The present and the future are bound by the time between them. In the same way, there’s what we know and what we don’t -- and something binds them, too.

The Bone Clocks is about all of that. It’s about the here and now, and it leaps forward to decades from now, when the world has morphed into something we recognize yet is also very different. In that sense, it’s also a post-apocalyptic novel. On top of all this, but unmentioned in the novel itself, is the fact that characters from other Mitchell novels make appearances. Sometimes cameos, sometimes major roles, these appearances are the threads that begin to bind his works together into a larger whole. Much as Mitchell’s novellas comprise his novels, it’s starting to look like his novels comprise something much larger.

I could go on and on about the terrain The Bone Clocks covers, but you should discover it on your own. No spoilers here. As I was, you’ll be mesmerized by Mitchell’s sentences. He knows how to create one and how to use one. Reading him is like watching a master craftsman build furniture. Whatever its form, he gives it his all -- and his all is hypnotic.

The Bone Clocks is a wondrous, wonderful work. A testament, after all of its astounding literary pyrotechnics, to the simplest thing: family. For Holly Sykes, family is everything. This book is about its power, its pull, its push, its intoxications, and the nameless magic that inspires us to shape our lives the ways we shape them. ◊

Fiction: The Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker

Already a publishing sensation in Europe, Joel Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (Penguin) is one of those books everyone has been talking about. It’s a novel held aloft by a lot of hype, and much of it is even deserved. It reads fast. It’s got an intricate plot, and it’s been compared to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo -- though in truth it has none of that book’s urgency or bowstring tautness or even its unspeakable violence. What it does have is a boatload of characters you come to care about and a story that will keep you guessing. It even tries to give itself some meaning. What more could you want?


The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is a novel about perception. Dicker, in his first novel, reveals that he is a master at creating perception based on perspective. Whereas most novels are told from one point of view, this one is told in several, all happening at once -- or what seems like at once.

The plot centers on three people: Marcus Goldman, a young novelist whose college professor inspired him to become a writer; Harry Quebert, the professor, a successful novelist now enjoying his twilight years; and Nola Kellergan, the young woman Harry loved, but who was murdered 33 years ago, leaving him alone and destroyed.

The story jumps back and forth in time constantly between 2008 and events leading up to Nola’s murder in 1970. In short, filmic scenes, we spend a lot of time with all three of them, as well as with many other members of the small New Hampshire town where they live. Much of the book follows Marcus’s investigation into Nola’s murder, trying to uncover secrets that both bind the town together and threaten to rip it apart at the seams. We read many parts of the story over and over again, from different points of view, and each time a new detail or motivation or lie is revealed. There are assumptions, there are lies, there’s regret, there are actions and consequences, and there is, eventually, truth. They say that there are three versions of any story: what I think happened, what you think happened, and what actually happened. This book is about all three, except there are more like twenty.
This is why I say the book is about perception. There can be only one truth about who murdered Nola -- as well as why and how -- but the novel offers up many of them before we finally learn the one that really matters. Dicker’s gift is that he doesn’t seem to be playing with the reader; instead, he’s having fun with his characters, and we’re just watching. He knows these people, and he wants them to know the solution as much as they themselves do -- and as much as we do.

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is terrific fun -- and it deserves a place in your beach bag.
Now, having said all that, I also have to stand back and wonder why I wasn’t blown away, as I thought I would be -- and as the hype assured me I would be. As involving as it is, I have to admit that sometimes this book is written in a way that makes what’s happening in Somerset sound like a badly written arc of As the World Turns. I attribute this, at least some of it, to the translator. His take has turned what could have been a tight, relentless thriller into a book that’s, well, not so thrilling. Captivating, yes. Fun, yes. But shocking, disturbing, dark, like Steig Larsson’s trilogy? No.

The action unfolds at a few key locations: the town’s diner, Marcus’ house (he borrows it from Harry), another house or two, the roads in and around town. You get the whole small-townness of the setting, the closing of the ranks as an outsider comes poking around. There’s serious threat, and there are serious secrets that beg to be uncovered once the clues are assembled. But they’re assembled, it all comes to a close so nicely. So neatly. What I wanted was a loose end or two. I wanted messiness, especially from such a messy tale.

Peppered throughout are tidbits about writing gleaned from conversations Harry had with Marcus when Marcus was his student. Harry tells him how to write a novel, a novel people will lose themselves in, a novel people will talk about. Much of the advice makes sense, and I suppose Dicker follows all the advice well, because I was drawn in, intrigued, and pretty well satisfied. But still, except for a few choice moments, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair feels very surface to me, very shallow, and that’s a shame. Because I think it’s more than that, and I think Dicker set out to do more than that. In a way, the tidbits, while interesting, undermine the tale they’re meant to illuminate. They’re almost a series of winks from the author that in some small way taint the novel itself. They don’t break the fourth wall, but they very nearly do, the way, say, blood spatters on a camera lens remind you that you’re watching a movie, when that’s the last thing you want.
Le Journal du Dimanche, in France, said: “If you dip your toes into this major novel, you’re finished; you won’t be able to keep from sprinting through to the last page.” The sprinting part is true. But to call The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair a major novel is the problem. It’s big, at 643 pages. But major? I wish.

New Yesterday: The Unwitting by Ellen Feldman

Guggenheim Fellow, Ellen Feldman, wows us with her fifth novel, The Unwitting (Spiegel & Grau).

Set against the tumultuous backdrop of the Cold War as it was experienced in the United States, we join young magazine writer Nell Benjamin on November 22, 1963, as she gets some distressing news. Yes: it is the day President Kennedy was shot, and that’s distressing enough. But what Nell learns impacts her on a much more personal level. Her husband, the hotshot editor of a literary magazine and a man she thought she knew thoroughly, has betrayed her in a very complete way, and not with another woman.

There is a lot going on in The Unwitting. In some ways it is a stylish portrait of love and marriage. In another it reveals an America in the throes of horrible change, still dealing with the fallout of the McCarthy era and preparing to take its place on the international Cold War stage.

The Unwitting is unexpected. Compelling enough to take its place with the best of crime fiction, Feldman’s language is loving, bright and sharp while her storytelling abilities are unquestionable here. The Unwitting cuts us into an interesting time, then ramps things up.

Feldman’s novel, Scottsboro, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Feldman is clearly a writer who is going places, The Unwitting brings that home: it’s a terrific book. ◊


Sienna Powers is a contributing editor to January Magazine.

SF/F: Lovecraft’s Monsters edited by Ellen Datlow

I can’t imagine that there is a serious reader of SF/F and horror fiction in the English language that does not know Ellen Datlow’s name.

Not only is Datlow a sharp and observant writer, for 30 years she has been one of the ranking editors in the genre. She was the fiction editor at OMNI and is the editor of over 50 anthologies, many of which have been featured somewhere in January Magazine over the years. (Often under my byline. And I’ll admit it: I’m a fan.) So needless to say, when a book with Datlow’s name on the cover enters my world, I sit up and pay attention.

In this case, though, there was more than one reason to take notice. In Lovevcraft’s Monsters (Tachyon), Datlow brings together some of the top SF/F and horror writers working today and has them play in Lovecraft’s bizarre world. And that’s a delight. To see the likes of Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, Elizabeth Bear and many others writing what is, in one way, very much like Lovecraftian fanfic is very little short of wonderful.

Nor is this Datlow’s first foray in this sub-sub genre. In 2009 she edited Lovecraft Unbound, a book that contained “mostly new stories inspired by Lovecraft.” In Lovecraft’s Monsters, Datlow says she feels she has pushed “thematic boundaries to the breaking point,” with stories from some authors not known for the type included in the anthology.

The stories are weirdly wonderful. But so, also, is the artwork: spectacularly rendered original illustrations appear throughout John Coulthart.

If you loved Cthulhu, Shoggoths, the Deep Ones and the other monsters that haunted Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s sad and creepy vision, you’ll gobble up Lovecraft’s Monsters.

Fiction: The Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Watching a marriage grind to its painful, soul-shattering conclusion should not hold moments of strong wit. Yet Jenny Offill’s shimmering second novel not only manages this, it elevates domestic fiction to its highest possible form.

Slender, tiny (fit it easily in your bag for your daily commute) The Dept. of Speculation (Knopf) is barely a novella in length, yet it packs an epic whallop. It does this by way of emotional miles covered as we follow our nameless narrator through the final days of an unsatisfying marriage and the reawakening of a woman who has been emotionally sleeping through the common catastrophes of contemporary relationships. “The wife’s” marriage is crumbling, her career is stalled, her baby has grown to take over a huge portion of her life. She is unsatisfied, stagnating and -- as it is for all of us -- every day just takes her closer to death.

Like Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Offill takes a topic -- and, truly, an angle -- that is so everyday and puts it under a narrative microscope that reveals what we hoped all along: there are stripes of extraordinary in all of us. And that which on the surface can appear humdrum, doesn’t need to be viewed through a kaleidoscope to have its full colors revealed.

This is Offill’s second novel. Her debut work, Last Things, was lauded, awarded and over 10 years ago. Let’s hope she doesn’t make us wait so long again. ◊


India Wilson is a writer and artist.

New This Week: The Lost Sisterhood by Anne Fortier

Though it felt like a long wait since Juliet, Anne Fortier’s 2010 debut, The Lost Sisterhood (Ballantine) seems absolutely worth it. Once again we have stunning historical detail, though this time with a strong thread of fantasy: or so many of us have been led to believe.

As the book opens, we meet bright young thing Diana Morgan, a philologist at Oxford University with a personal fixation on the Amazons that her colleagues find ridiculous. Morgan’s fixation has a strong foundation, though: an eccentric grandmother who thought that she herself was descended from the Amazons.

Diana’s beliefs seem vindicated when a mysterious organization invites her to consult on an excavation that will prove the Amazons existed.

In another thread, we meet those elusive and legendary Amazons as they begin their trek in North Africa and set out, accompanied by great danger and exciting adventure, on a mission of revenge.

One of the things that made this literary journey so enjoyable is the fact that there just hasn't been much fiction about the Amazons, though myths abound. Fortier leads us through largely uncharted territory as we follow her tribe of warrior women from North Africa on an indirect journey to their ultimate home.

The Lost Sisterhood is a perfectly fleshed out embodiment of a bit of lost history it would be wonderful to be able to believe. ◊

New Today: Night in Shanghai by Nicole Mones

Kiriyama Prize contending author Nicole Mones mixes things up deeply in her fourth novel, Night in Shanghai (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

An African American jazz musician from Baltimore is recruited to lead an all black jazz orchestra in Shanghai in 1936. Once there he discovers his life has taken a startling turn. Where he had struggled mightily back in the States -- against both poverty and racism -- he discovers that, in Shanghai he is revered and can reach for the highest heights.

While there, his life becomes entangled with that of the beautiful, educated and forbidden Song Yuhua. While Song initially appears obedient to the most powerful crime boss in Shanghai, it develops that she is secretly a spy.

To this already intriguing set up of characters, Mones mixes in the onset of the Second World War and a sea of change that will alter the very face of Shanghai -- and in some ways the world -- for ever.

Whether or not you recall her name, this is a storyteller whose voice we trust in matters of the recently historical. Not only is she the author of the stellar Lost in Translation and two other novels, her non-fiction work has appeared in the New York Times magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Gourmet magazine and she is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.

Mones has said that Night in Shanghai is the result of extensive research. The novel is based on historic events including China’s role during the Holocaust when it became the only nation to welcome all Jews who managed to get there. Aspects of this are dramatized in the book. Mones’ genius comes in her attention for detail and her ability to sort out which of the vast array of facts she must search through will give the book its verisimilitude. And while Jazz Age China leaps to life for us, it never bogs down in encyclopedic overexplanation.

Night in Shanghai is a riveting, entertaining and illuminating look at a moment that has largely been lost from history. ◊

Fiction: The Forever Girl by Alexander McCall Smith

Fans of Alexander McCall Smith’s internationally beloved Ladies Detective Agency novels may find themselves confused by his latest book, The Forever Girl (Knopf Canada/Random House). Not an entry in either of McCall’s long-running series, The Forever Girl explores the nature and nuance of love through interlinked stories involving a couple and their daughter.

A child experiences her first love at age six, though she doesn’t have the words to describe it or the experience to understand. At the same time, her parents are discovering they are less in love than they once were. As the child, Clover, grows and changes, so does her love, even while her parents continue to struggle with their own realities and definitions.

This sweet and well-honed story shows McCall Smith to advantage. The characters and the tale are engaging and The Forever Girl emerges as a contemplation of love and how it forms us. Even so, it seems to me that many of this author’s fans will be put off by both the language and the very nature of the book. Though McCall Smith’s well known humor is not absent here, in The Forever Girl he uses it as a tool for examination of the inner-workings of the human heart and the tone, in general, is considerably less jaunty.

Now 65, McCall Smith is one of the most prolific authors alive, having written more than 50 books. ◊


Monica Stark is a contributing editor to January Magazine. She currently makes her home on a liveaboard boat in the North Pacific.

New in Paperback: All That Is by James Salter

A soldier returns from battles on the Pacific front and applies what he learned in WWII to the gritty world of publishing in New York City. Salter’s prose is startlingly muscular and economical. Sometimes there’s little on the page beyond raw power.

All That Is (Vintage) is PEN/Faulkner-winning Salter (A Sport and a Pastime, The Hunters) at his very best. How can a book this physically slight be this dazzling? War, peace, love, hate and raw, destructive ambition. Every detail is meaningful and every passage seems carefully wrought and effortlessly shared. Even the historical backdrop skillfully highlights not only how far we’ve traveled, but how little we’ve changed.

This is one of those books that has been very difficult to write about. James Salter’s first novel in 30 years so fills me with a desire to reach for hyperbole, even while the story itself is ultimately so simple, it’s difficult to explain. I’ll keep it simple and say it this way: All That Is may be the best book from a master. ◊

Jones Atwater is a musician, sports fanatic and struggling author. He lives in Ohio with his Fender Stratocaster, Pearl, and his cat, Rhea.

Best Books of 2013: Fiction

Below you will find the Fiction segment of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2013 feature, completing this year’s postings. You can see our picks for the Best Non-Fiction here, while Best Crime Fiction is here, Best Cookbooks are here and Best Books for Children and Young Adults are here. -- LLR

David Abrams is the author of Fobbit (Grove/Atlantic, 2012) and regularly blogs about books at The Quivering Pen.

• At the Bottom of Everything by Ben Dolnick (Pantheon)
Ben Dolnick’s novel about two childhood friends trying, as adults, to reconcile past mistakes held me in its grip so hard that I found myself at two a.m. one night turning pages so quickly my fingers were crosshatched with tiny papercuts. At that point in the novel, Adam had traveled to India in search of his old friend Thomas who is now lost, both bodily and in the corridors of his mind. Both men are in their 20s and are trying to deal with a terrible accident for which they were responsible as reckless teenagers. Guilt has wracked them each in separate ways and they drifted apart over the years -- Adam (the novel’s narrator) is now a tutor who’s having sex with the mother of one of his students, and Thomas has seemed to disappear off the face of the earth. His worried parents reach out to Adam in hopes he can track him down. Though Adam resists being pulled back into Thomas’ life, he also knows it’s inevitable. He tells us on the first page: “I’d spent the last couple of years... ignoring the fact that Thomas needed me, as if his life were a flashing Check Engine light in the corner of my dashboard.” Dolnick subtly asks big questions: What is our responsibility to the lives of others? Should we take it upon ourselves to rescue lost souls? How do we forgive ourselves for bad deeds? Is it ever possible to move on from the errors of our past? Another question he might have asked himself: “What is my responsibility to readers who end up bleeding from papercuts?”

• I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro (Grove/Atlantic):
Jamie Quatro’s debut is a profound, weird, funny, sad and wholly-original gathering of short fiction.   Nearly a year after reading it, I’m still thinking of highlights: a church that falls apart, sending its parishioners to live in the woods; an ultra-marathon in which runners carry totems -- including a glass-blown penis -- in backpacks; and several heartbreaking stories about a family coping with the loss of its matriarch as she battles cancer. Set in the South -- primarily on Lookout Mountain which straddles the border between Georgia and Tennessee -- Quatro’s stories take on broad themes like adultery, spirituality, grief and parenting, but it’s the intimacy of the characters which drives the book forward. There’s a quadriplegic mother at a pool party, a rotting lover’s corpse in a bed, a fair amount of phone sex and at least one frail character’s perilous journey up and down a hilly suburban street in her quest to mail a letter about the Iraq War to President Bush. Quatro’s style has the terse, stabbing power of Raymond Carver in his finest hour, but at the same time there’s the fuller lyricism of something by Alice Munro, languorously stretching and humming below the surface of the words. Each time I finished one of the stories, I thought, “Wow, that’s the best one in the book,” and then I’d go on to the next story and find it was the best one. I ended up closing the book and sighing, “Okay, they’re all the best.” I can’t wait for Jamie Quatro to show me more with her next book.

• Sparta by Roxana Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Conrad Farrell comes home from the war in Iraq, skin unbroken and all limbs still attached... and yet he is a damaged man, a wounded warrior struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder -- like so many (too many) of our returning veterans. PTSD is at the heart of Roxana Robinson’s riveting novel Sparta which describes the condition in terms I’ve never before seen on the page. Precise as a psychological case history, the book charts the painful journey of Conrad from gung-ho boy to disillusioned warrior to broken man. Conrad comes from a family that’s “bookish and liberal, not martial and authoritarian,” with a mother and father who can’t understand why their son would want to take up arms in defense of his country. Conrad, a classics major in college, is drawn to the stories of the ancient world -- particularly Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, and the Iliad. “I want to do something big,” he tells his family when announcing his decision to join the Marines. “I want to do something that has consequences.” Little does he know, he’ll be the one on the receiving end of those consequences. No matter where you fall in the spectrum between hawk and dove, Robinson’s novel is powerfully affecting and takes its place on the shelf of essential war literature.

• All That Is by James Salter (Knopf)
At the center of All That Is, James Salter’s first novel in 35 years, stands Phillip Bowman who we first see as a young naval officer in WWII, then a Harvard student, and then on to a Mad Men life as a book editor in mid-century Manhattan. He lives, he loves, he advances toward death -- nothing too remarkable plot-wise, but the book’s power is all in the telling. Salter’s language is beautiful and confident. How many writers do you know who can carry off describing the span and breadth of one person’s life in the space of just one paragraph? Seemingly minor characters are given full, rich treatments in big, bold strokes. James Salter is hardly a household name -- even, sadly, in bookish households -- but he’s been quietly producing great works of literature since the late 1950s. In his generous and spot-on review for the New York Times, Malcolm Jones wrote: “Salter is 87, with a reputation so secure he has nothing left to prove. If there were a Mount Rushmore for writers, he’d be there already. He could have published nothing, and no one would have thought less of him.”  And yet, here he is in the twilight of a career with what could arguably be his best book so far.  It is full of language distilled down to pure, true sentences.

• Falling to Earth by Kate Southwood (Europa Editions)
Pivoting off the real-life Tri-State Tornado of 1925, Kate Southwood’s debut novel is a riveting account of wealth, gossip and ostracism. The wind's devastation is described in vivid images like “a woman is frozen, screaming under a tree at a child’s body caught high in its branches” and “trees have been snatched out of the ground like hanks of hair.” Paul Graves, owner of a successful lumberyard, miraculously survives the tornado as the rest of his small Illinois town is flattened. While the tornado scene (which comes upon us quickly in the first chapter) is breathtaking in its fury, the most fascinating part of the story is how Paul is shunned by the rest of his town for his good fortune (none of his family members are hurt and his house and store are left standing in a landscape reduced to splinters and rubble). It’s a clever reversal of the Biblical story of Job. Instead of being stripped of everything by God, Paul is divinely spared -- and that’s the worst thing which could have happened to him.

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Jones Atwater is a musician, sports fanatic and struggling author. He lives in Ohio with his Fender Stratocaster, Pearl, and his cat, Rhea.

• Eucalyptus by Mauricio Segura, translated by Donald Winkler (Biblioasis)
In Chile for his father’s funeral, Alberto discovers that there was more to the man he hated than he ever knew while he was alive. Author and filmmaker Mauricio Segura was born in Chile and raised in Montreal, where he still lives. I found two things absolutely remarkable about Eucalyptus. Firstly, Segura’s descriptions of Chile are magical and exotic. However the story, though perfectly told, is a familiar one, exploring as it does the age old themes of loss and redemption.

• The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (Harper)
Part of the charm and fascination for Helene Wecker’s deliciously muscular debut novel is that you don’t know what the hell you’re in for. The Golem and the Jinni is an immigrant’s tale set in turn-of-the-century New York. But one of the immigrants proves to be a golem, made of clay. The other is a jinni, constructed of fire. Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature are threaded through the text and the resulting book is magical and completely unexpected.

• The Hope Factory by Lavanya Sankaran  (Dial)
The second book of the author of 2006’s The Red Carpet, a collection of fresh and fascinating stories set in Bangalore. The Hope Factory seems to pull what was best about Sankaran’s first book and set it to the music of a full-length work. The result is a stunning debut novel. Sankaran’s voice is funny, wise and wry as she weaves her way cunningly through this novel of domestic disturbance in a newly industrialized Bangalore. Anand and Vidya are the new, modern Bangalore. Anand gives every appearance of being the successful businessman, right down to his grasping, demanding wife, Vidya. On the other end of the comfort scale is their maid, Kamala, a woman whose life is precarious in part because of an unsuccessful marriage and a son on the verge of bad-boydom, but in another part because Kamala’s happiness depends also on her employer’s wife, and that’s not a good place for anyone to be. The Hope Factory is a pleasing and delicious book and Sankaran is a writer whose gifts we anticipate enjoying further in future.

• The Strength of Bone by Lucie Wilk (Biblioasis)
In her debut novel, Lucie Wilk does an admirable job of avoiding the expected in her story about a widowed North American doctor and a Malawian nurse who both find themselves in Blantyre in Malawi, in Africa, working through what is expected of them in order to try and find what might be correct. Those words might conjure up a different type of story, but the two characters never spark. Instead we are treated to an inside view of the bleak and hopeless seeming world of medicine in parts of Africa. And more. Wilk, who is herself a practicing doctor, uses the novel to explore various concepts around the stark and steady demands of need and healing and the human emotions that fuel it all. This was not an easy read, emotionally. But it was so very worthwhile.

• Three War Stories by David Mamet (Argo-Navis)
Even if perpetually controversial playwright David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, Wag the Dog) had not picked such a perpetually controversial path to publishing his latest book, it would still be beyond worthwhile. The novellas is Three War Stories are classically Mamet which is a little like saying they are compelling and highly readable, even if the great one did decide to publish them on his own because, as he told the New York Times earlier this year, he is “a curmudgeon, and because publishing is like Hollywood – nobody ever does the marketing they promise.” Though the cover is second rate and the inside production value of the book lacks big six snap, the stories themselves are stellar… and classic Mamet. Two short stories an a novella comprise Three War Stories examine the edges of forgiveness and redemption. An extraordinary book.

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Lincoln Cho is a freelance writer and editor. He lives in the Chicago area, where he works in the high-tech industry. He is currently working on a his first novel, a science-fiction thriller set in the world of telecommunications.

• In the Company of Thieves by Kage Baker (Tachyon)
Would I have loved this book as much had it been published while its prolific and award-winning author were still alive? I’m not sure. As it was, seeing new work from Kage Baker three years after her death was, for me, an unexpected treat. The stories here are all set in Baker’s Company universe, some of them have never been published before and a few were completed by Baker’s sister, Kathleeen Bartholomew, who has taken on the editing of some of the author’s work. Even skeptical fans will be pleased at the results, I think. Especially since it means new adventures from a pen we feared had been forever stilled.

• The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (William Morrow)
Gaiman’s grown up fans have been waiting for a book for them since 2005’s Anansi Boys. In the time between, of course, there have been a number of books, but they have all been aimed at young readers, including The Dangerous Alphabet (2008) and Fortunately the Milk (2013). Longtime Gaiman fans will be happy to get their hands on The Ocean at the End of the Lane. This is classic Gaiman: magical realism-slash-fantasy in the richest possible sense. A 50-ish man returns to his childhood home in rural England for a funeral. While there he discovers a neighboring family’s magical secret. I wanted the book to be longer: but only for me. As a story, it’s perfectly complete.

• The Resurrectionist by E.B. Hudspeth (Quirk)
An extraordinarily fine example of the direction in which some think the book as form is headed now. In a world where fiction can be created easily and spat out just as fast, that which is very finedeserves special treatment. Like a cross between Gray’s Anatomy and Shelley’s Frankenstein, Hudspeth’s debut work resonates with life, even though it is almost entirely concerned with death. An artist, Hudspeth was researching the anatomy of an angel’s wing while working on a sculpture when the seed for the idea that would become The Resurrectionist began to form. The book follows the fictional Dr. Spencer Black through his childhood and medical training and then to his mysterious disappearance. The book is illustrated by the doctor’s fantastical drawings of creatures that perhaps were or might have been before the book vanished as quickly as did its author. That’s the premise: a long-lost manuscript of a long-forgotten doctor. And Hudspeth makes it work horrifically.

• The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books)
Though The Shining Girls is not Lauren Beukes’s first novel, for me it was a complete surprise. I’m not sure what I expected, but whatever it was, was not this, a story so compelling, it grabbed me by the socks and would not let go. Is it thriller? Well, it’s thrilling. Is it horror? There’s lots of that here, too. And while I’m pretty clear it is not SF/F as I understand SF/F to be, Beukes is a previous winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award (for 2010’s Zoo City). The Shining Girls is about a time-traveling serial-killer and all because a Chicago house is forcing him to do it. This is scary and compelling fiction at its very, very best. I loved The Shining Girls end to end.

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Sienna Powers is a transplanted Calgarian who lives and works in Vancouver, B.C. She is a writer and conceptual artist.

• A Beautiful Truth by Colin McAdam (Soho/Hamish Hamilton)
From the author of Some Great Thing and Fall, a childless couple adopts a chimpanzee as their son and you know from the set up and the tone that things will not end well. In another thread, we follow a troop of chimpanzees that are part of a language experiment in Florida. This is a haunting, thought-provoking book that charms and alarms in single, bold strokes. A haunting, unforgettable and, ultimately, heart-breaking book. Since we end up learning an awful lot about chimpanzees it’s to McAdam’s credit that the book doesn’t bog under his research. It holds an air of authority and compassion and is never pedantic.

• Red Girl, Rat Boy by Cynthia Flood (Biblioasis)
It seems such a slender book to have grabbed this small spot among my favorites of the year, but that is the nature of Flood’s power. Here the Journey Prize-winning author packs a lot of that power into 11 taut stories that celebrate and challenge women of all types. Flood is unflinching, but her readers might not be so brave. The author is honest to the point of occasional emotional and unsentimental brutality. This is amazing stuff.

• What Changes Everything by Masha Hamilton (Unbridled)
Masha Hamilton’s writing is always informed by her worldview. Hamilton spent a decade as a journalist in conflict zones in the Middle East and is currently attached to the US Embassy in Kabul. So when she tells the story of the wife of a kidnapped American diplomat in Afghanistan that ring of authenticity you hear on every page is absolutely real. And it is not only Hamilton’s work with the foreign press and diplomatic corps that are the cause of this, but also the author’s deep empathy for and understanding of not only the human condition but human emotion and the games people play, both with themselves and with others. A thoughtful and compelling book.

• Tiger Rag by Nicholas Christopher (Dial Press)
Jazz myths loom large in Tiger Rag, a book that is at least thinly based on  the life of jazz legend Buddy Bolden. I say “thinly” because, truly, not a lot is known about Bolden. His star burned hot, swift and terribly sad. Born in 1877 in New Orleans, at the age of 30 he was committed to the  Louisiana State Insane Asylum at Jackson where he stayed until his death in 1931 at the age of 54. The things we do know about Bolden are shrouded in mist and mystery and the talented cornetist left no known recordings. None documented, that is. Rumors of his recordings still beat hot in the jazz community today. So it is that Christopher comes to embed unanswered questions and bits of intrigue into his own deeply felt version of what-might-have-been. One of the myths is that Bolden made a recording in 1904 -- “Tiger Rag” -- that was subsequently lost in the intervening years. Christopher turns the mist into a Holy Grail of a tale that stretches from New Orleans in 1900 to present day Florida where a once-prominent anesthesiologist is dealing with the death of her career and the collapse of her family.

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Monica Stark is a contributing editor to January Magazine. She currently makes her home on a liveaboard boat somewhere in the North Pacific.

• Is This Tomorrow by Caroline Leavitt (Algonquin)
Caroline Leavitt’s 10th novel is a triumph of light and dark. The story at times brings to mind Dennis Lehane’s masterful Mystic River: a missing child, Boston, and the shocking darkness of the human heart, starkly glimpsed. In the end, though, Is This Tomorrow is a woman’s story in a way that Mystic River never could be. And, ultimately, it begs the question: when someone goes missing, what happens to those left behind? Though all of Leavitt’s novels have been superb and highly acclaimed, it strikes me that Is This Tomorrow is her most accomplished work. There is a sharp nuance here, one that reverberates throughout. That and lovely, vivid characterizations and superb period detail contribute to making what may be Leavitt’s best book yet.

• PostaPoc by Liz Worth (Now or Never)
PostaPoc is elegant and surprising. The language is beautiful: Worth conjures up strong, poetic and lasting images to create her dying world. Despite this poetry, the world dies without thunder. No zombies or blasted cityscapes, just a cyberpunk rendering of what the end might look like, with everything reduced to basics and everyone just struggling with survival. Young Ang is part of an underground music scene that obsesses about the end of the world. They obsess so deeply that, when that end comes, Ang can’t help but feel as though she is in part to blame. And then that survival. And struggles. And our own doubts, as well look back with her and try, against all instinct, to look ahead. The end is surprising. Unexpected, yet perfect. With everything concluded, but nothing wrapped up. PostaPoc is entirely riveting and worthwhile.

• Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford (Ballantine) Jamie Ford’s second novel is exactly what you’re hoping to find when you pick up a family saga. It’s what you hope to find, but so seldom do. The book is polished, the storytelling sound, but there is heart here, as well. And passion. In other words, a balanced parcel in every way and one of my top reads of the year. A Chinese American orphan sees an exotic actress, Willow Frost, at the theatre and feels certain it is his mother, lost to him many years before. He determines to find and confront her: how could she have given him up? What was the story there? The deeper he delves, however, the more starkly he discovers that there is more to that story than initially met the eye.

• The Harem Midwife by Roberta Rich (Doubleday Canada)
American readers won’t see Roberta Rich’s follow up to The Midwife of Venice until early in 2014. They’re in for a treat. This briskly paced historical novel is set in Constantinople in 1579. Hannah and Isaac, now exiled from Venice, have created new lives for themselves. He works in the silk trade, while she is a midwife of skill and repute and she finds much work tending to the thousand women in Sultan Murat III’s harem. Here she meets young Leah, a slave who will be the Sultan’s next conquest and the mother of an heir. But the girl is terrified and prevails on Hannah to help her. While the correct moral choice seems clear to her, Hannah is less clear on how the politics of thwarting the sultan’s wishes might impact her career… and even her life. This is rich and finely spun historical fiction. As good as it gets.

• The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (Little, Brown)
In a year of deep, rich historical novels Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker-winning effort grabbed a lot of the headlines, though for good reason: this is a lot of book. Not just in volume (and at over 800 pages, it certainly does have volume to spare) but in complexity of thought and luxurious depth of narrative. All that said, it still manages to be highly readable and thoroughly engaging. Set on the New Zealand goldfields during the Victorian era, those who love some mystery with their history in a highly literate package will gobble this one up.

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Linda L. Richards is the editor of January Magazine and the author of a dozen books, the most recent of which is the mystery novel Death Was in the Blood.

• Enon by Paul Harding (Random House)
Looking back, it seems to me that a lot of the books I liked best in 2013 did not stand alone. That is to say, most could function under their own steam, but -- for various reasons -- they were a detail from a larger picture. So it was with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding’s Enon. The book follows up Harding’s stunning 2009 debut, Tinkers, with another chapter in the lives of the Crosby family. This time out we meet Charlie, grandson of George Crosby who was Tinkers’ central character. This is a blazing follow-up to Harding’s debut. With drugs, self-loathing and exquisite beauty focusing this lurch at madness, Harding here confirms what early fans suspected: Tinkers was no accident and Harding is a writer to watch.

• MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese/McLelland & Stewart)
When I read Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood I did not realize they were the first installments in the MaddAddam trilogy. I only knew I was reading something beyond special: something groundbreaking and world-changing and… well… different. Atwood is brilliant. Whether or not you love her literary stylings, the brilliance can’t be denied. And I love her literary stylings, so clearly, MaddAddam was always a book I was going to love. And Atwood does not disappoint. Post-Apocalyptic does not begin to cover the MaddAddam world, though that’s a better start than some. It seems as though, every futuristic disaster that can be conceived of was first imagined by Atwood in one of these three books. The danger of GMOs. The death of the bees and now, bioengineered replacements for humans. All of this is spun in Atwood’s disturbingly arresting poetic voice. This is fantastic, world-bending stuff. And, sorry: it is perfect.

• The Way of the Dog by Sam Savage (Coffee House Press) The Way of the Dog is Sam Savage’s fourth novel, after Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, Cry of the Sloth and Glass. Like those books, The Way of the Dog is poetic in nature, both for its lovely prose, but also for the stance: searching looks at the things closest to us. In this novel, Savage guides us through the experience of the artist looking back and coming to terms with choices that were difficult and not always “correct” yet finding a certain peace, nonetheless. Most of Harold-by-way-of-Savage’s observations are subtle and beautiful and we accompany him as he works through a lifetime’s worth of bitterness in order to make peace with himself and his world. It’s a quietly incredible book by an astonishingly overlooked author.

• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Little, Brown and Company)
Because she seems cavalier with our feelings and because she makes us wait, it’s easy to trash Donna Tartt whose extraordinary 1992 debut, The Secret History, was so brilliant, it kept us on the edge of our seats waiting for a follow up. For a decade. And when 2002’s The Little Friend finally appeared we were willing to forgive… a teensy bit. But in 2013, Tartt wowed us again while confirming what we’d most feared: the wait? It was worth it. Fiction like this simply does not come every day. More: where The Secret History was engagingly green, The Goldfinch is a master work. There were elements of Tartt’s debut that were a little overwrought and maybe (maybe!) not quite tight. These things can not be said of The Goldfinch, where we spend each page enthralled in the mental machinations of Theo Decker, orphaned at 13 and left to the devices of Park Avenue and art.

• The Orenda by Joseph Boyden (Hamish Hamilton)
This is the third book in Boyden’s gripping multigenerational Bird family saga, following Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce. Canadian historical fiction set in the 17th century, The Orenda is narrated by three characters: a Jesuit missionary, an Iroquois teenager kidnapped by Hurons and a warrior named Bird who is mourning the loss of his family to the Iroquois. This look at an aspect of Canadian aboriginal culture is timely, but it is not heavy handed. Boyden is no Aseop, with morals to stories at the ready. This is a poetic, spiritual journey that gives those of us pondering the place where all Canadian cultures fit together food for thought. Though, honestly, even without that, this book (and this trilogy) would be stunning. When we look back at important Canadian fiction 100 years from now, Boyden’s Bird series will be near the top of the list.

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India Wilson is a writer and artist.

• Caught by Lisa Moore (Anansi/Grove) People toss around the phrase “literary thriller” all the time, and it seldom has much meaning. A thriller that is well written should be a given, these days. And a work of literature that has thrilling elements is not much of an exception to a lot of rules. However Lisa Moore’s latest is actually a book deserving of the term. Moore’s language is taut and fraught and even sometimes poetic. Yet it’s an old-fashioned crime story that satisfies in that old timey way. As the book begins, it’s the late 1970s and pot trafficker David Slaney has escaped from prison. With the authorities in hot pursuit, we follow Slaney across Canada and into Mexico. On his journey we are treated to character studies and vignettes of the characters and places he encounters on his journey. The ending is worthy of a thriller and not the least bit expected. Brace yourself: Caught is an amazing ride.

• Night Film by Marisha Pessl (Random House)
This was easily one of the most hyped books of 2013. As a result, my hopes upon approach were not high. I was wrong. A beautiful young woman, daughter of a famous and reclusive maker of horror films, is found dead in a warehouse. Her death is determined to be a suicide, but an investigative journalist thinks differently. As he pursues his investigation, he discovers a lot of fishy stuff that he suspects is more than coincidence. This deft and muscular literary thriller from the author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2007) leaves one breathless.

• The Eliot Girls by Krista Bridge (Douglas & McIntyre)
Early in 2013, January’s editor, Linda L. Richards, shot an advance copy of The Eliot Girls at me, commanding, “Read this. I’m pretty sure it’s right up your alley.” As she so often is in matters like this, she was right. I loved Toronto author Krista Bridge’s unusual debut novel from the opening pages and, months later, I love it still. Audrey Brindle has always dreamed of attending the private school where her mother teaches. But it doesn’t take a crystal ball to know where this will lead us. Audrey imagines the possible glamor of a private school. But reality brings bullying and intolerance. (Is there any creature on Earth nastier than a teenage girl?) It all sounds a bit gothic when I say it like that but, in reality, it’s all of that and starchily feminist, as well. The Eliot Girls deserved the many accolades rained upon it in it’s Canadian debut year. Look for it soon in a country near you.

• The Lullaby of Polish Girls by Dagmara Dominczyk (Spiegel & Grau)
This energetic and lovely debut by Polish-born Dagmara Dominczyk follows three best friends from the innocence of their 1980s Polish girlhood through to their complicated international lives as women. Dominczyk is better known as an actress than a writer, but that does nothing to mar this beautiful and poignantly executed first novel.

• The River and Enoch O’Reilly by Peter Murphy (Mariner) The title’s Enoch has chosen to pray to Elvis instead of God, though he once set out to be a preacher. In the winter of 1984, Murphy tells us, the fictional Irish rusty river Rua became swollen beyond her normal width. When the water receded two days later, survivors discovered the bodies of nine who were less lucky. Their deaths are mysterious. What could have caused them to venture forth of such a night? Nearby, in the basement of the family home, Enoch discovers distressing connections between those who perished the night of the storm and his own lost father and every mystery he himself has ever pondered. The River and Enoch O’Reilly is magical and Murphy’s is a voice I look forward to listening to again.