Murphy’s novel offers a reflective, cleareyed reckoning with memory, war, and the fragile mechanics of love.

Leo Mulcahy, a recently retired physician and former combat medic, sets out on a long-anticipated trip to Vietnam with his wife, Claire, hoping to revisit the places that shaped his youth and to confront—carefully, deliberately—a war he has spent decades keeping at arm’s length. As they move from contemporary Saigon toward the rural interior, guided by a local interpreter with his own wartime history, Leo searches for Quan Loi, the now-vanished base camp where he once served. The journey unfolds against the backdrop of Leo’s recent medical diagnosis, his uneasy transition into retirement, and the emotional weight Claire carries as the sister of a medic killed during the war. What begins as a pilgrimage rooted in curiosity and unfinished history gradually becomes a test of endurance, forcing Leo to navigate memory, grief, professional identity, and the unsettling realization that neither our bodies nor our pasts remain fully under our control. The narrative alternates between the present-day journey and layered recollections from Leo’s life—his years as a young medic in Vietnam, his long marriage, his medical career, and the ethical failures that continue to haunt him. Murphy renders Vietnam with careful specificity, not as a static site of trauma but as a living place. Saigon’s noise and density clash with Leo’s remembered silence, while the rediscovery of Quan Loi underscores how easily physical history can disappear. “With the jungle slowly taking over, Quan Loi would soon vanish,” Leo observes, a line that captures the book’s persistent tension between erasure and remembrance. Running parallel to the external journey is the portrait of Leo and Claire’s marriage. The author renders Claire with precision and warmth—she’s practical, impatient with wasted time, deeply empathetic, and quietly decisive. Their relationship gives the book much of its emotional ballast, grounding the historical material in domestic reality.

As the book progresses, the focus turns increasingly inward. Letters, dreams, and professional memories interrupt the forward motion, revealing how Leo’s medical training—his reliance on probabilities, diagnoses, and rational frameworks—has shaped his understanding of the world and its failures. The recurring metaphor of “hoofbeats,” a lesson from medical school about assuming common causes before rare ones, becomes a lens through which the author examines moral blindness and hindsight. Leo’s reflections on bad judgment, both personal and professional, are among the book’s most unsettling moments, precisely because they resist easy absolution. The prose remains measured and controlled throughout, favoring clarity over flourishes. Moments of humor surface unexpectedly, often through irony or understated observation, providing relief without diminishing the book’s gravity. The pacing is deliberate, which occasionally demands patience, but the accumulation of details will reward close attention. Rather than building toward a single revelatory moment, the narrative gains force through repetition and return, mirroring the way memory itself works. Attentive to time’s passage, to the body’s betrayals, and to the ethical residue of past decisions, Murphy prioritizes restraint over spectacle. He offers no simple reckonings and no false comforts, only the steady illumination of a life examined honestly.

A penetrating novel that suggests lives are shaped less by events than by what remains after them.

Sixteen tales span about 1,000 years as a New England town emerges, becomes an art colony and tourist destination, and faces a dark age. 

This collection returns to Murphy’s (Assumption City, 2012) fictional community of Egg Rock on Massachusetts’ North Shore. In an elegiac tone that brings to mind Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 poetry collection Spoon River Anthology, the tales follow characters as they make important decisions and show the ramifications of their actions. The book opens with Vikings arriving at a “magical” paradise—the future Egg Rock. The stories then sail on to address the town’s early-1800s ice trade with the Caribbean; the impact of prejudice on Boston’s Irish community during a cholera epidemic; New England’s abolition and pacifist movements before the Civil War; the dangers of 1880s lighthouse-keeping; mental health care in the early 20th century; U-boat spying during World War II; the agony of veterans following various wars; and the rise of feminism. The book breaks the narrative flow with a compelling literary experiment, as “John’s Peril I” and “John’s Peril II” offer different outcomes for the same character. It’s reminiscent of author Jack Finney’s twig-in-a-stream concept in Time and Again (1970), showing how small occurrences bump into one another to alter history. Indeed, the idea of cause and effect forms a strong undercurrent in this collection—one that results in intriguing effects. In “Shore Leave,” for example, a lighthouse keeper’s wife teaches her son, Ben, everything she knows about the heavens (“She made sure Ben saw moonrises and moonsets and the morning and evening stars”), and, by doing so, she inadvertently sets in motion Ben’s undoing in “Bottoms Up.” Readers may wish that the author provided a map of the many characters in these tales, but they’ll still find it fun to track their connections.

A quirky, rich, and elegantly written epic.

In Murphy’s debut novel, a primarily Catholic community in the Boston area struggles with diverging attitudes of faith in the aftermath of sex abuse scandals and family traumas.

Miracles, according to one of the many priests in this novel, are “one big headache for the Church.” Thus the community of Faneuil has many headaches in August 2002, when a giant, glowing image of the Virgin Mary appears on a wall at the local hospital. Like a faith-based Rorschach test, the image is interpreted by each viewer through a unique psychological prism. Hospital president Dr. Edward Cronin, a callous opportunist, gleefully folds this “miracle” into his morally corrupt plan to enrich himself with wealth and power by creating a shrine at the site. Yet the appearance of the mysterious image is surprisingly reassuring to some, including Dr. Tom Rowley, who has known no peace since his only child shot himself in December 1994, an event described in the book’s opening pages. As one character remarks in the book’s sad conclusion, “There’s no end to the Tommy Rowley tragedy.” Others are repulsed by what they assume to be a fake image, another example of religious manipulation, while still others find spiritual renewal by sharing the alleged miracle. In the action-filled week following the image’s appearance, several convoluted conspiracies and revenge plots are discovered, the Catholic hierarchy of Boston is upended, some families break apart and others draw closer together. All this compressed action comes at a cost. With dozens of characters listed in the book’s preface, pruning the cast would have created a more coherent narrative. The author is extremely well-versed in Catholic ritual and theology, which lends depth to the extensive discussions among the clergy. Although sexual abuse by priests is at the book’s heart, readers don’t witness revenge against those who committed the horrific crimes and those who covered it up. However, Murphy makes abundantly and painfully clear just how much suffering is felt by survivors and their families.

A thoughtful portrait of lives both destroyed and fortified by faith, though the reach of this ambitious debut novel ultimately exceeds its grasp.