A timeless, masterful epic.
In this ambitious novel, Taseer chronicles 40 years of modern Indian history through the eyes of a father and son, both scholars of the ancient Indian language Sanskrit.
In the midst of translating The Birth of Kumara, Skanda leaves Manhattan for Geneva to be with his gravely ill father, Toby, the maharaja of Kalasuryaketu. After Toby dies, Skanda must return his body to India, a country his father has not set foot in since 1992. From here, Taseer (Noon, 2011, etc.) skillfully shifts the narrative between Skanda in present-day Delhi and Toby, beginning in 1975, the year of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency,” continuing through the riots against Sikhs in 1984, the dissolution of his marriage to Skanda’s mother, and, in 1992, the demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya, along with the arrival of American daytime television. Sanskrit phrases bind and illuminate this enchanting saga, and it’s through father's and son’s devotion to the language and their shared “deep knowledge of classical India” that both Skanda and Toby make sense of the history and struggles of their country of origin. “Was the language all that had held the world together? Had that alone been the source of meaning?” As Skanda contemplates how India’s past political strife irrevocably damaged his parents’ marriage, Toby considers, years earlier, whether his love of Sanskrit has distracted him from seeing the truth about his beloved country. “His feeling for the language had now, for as long as he could remember, been part of his way of seeing, part of the way he configured the world. But had it blinded him to the reality of the place?” A year after Toby’s death, when Skanda must release his ashes into the Tamasa River, Skanda begins to appreciate his father’s “whole approach to things, to history, to memory, to place, to civilization.”
A timeless, masterful epic.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-86547-824-4
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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