Iran's brutal and tragic years of upheaval are evoked through a one-time revolutionary's rueful reflections.
Hamid Mozaffarian has arrived in New York City at a cold and lonely phase of his life. Having served almost three decades interrogating those considered enemies of the Iranian government, he is now helping his country’s minister for foreign affairs deal with “a tiff” between their navy and the Americans in the Persian Gulf. Hamid’s diplomatic mission enables him to reestablish contact with his mother and brother, from whom he’d been estranged since they exiled themselves to America after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He agrees to their request to carry, in a mint candy tin, the ashes of his father, who'd died two weeks earlier, so they can be scattered back in Iran. In the meantime, while in New York, Hamid struggles to come to grips with choices he's made that have also left him alienated from his wife and daughter back home. A sensitive, artistic boy fascinated by the vulnerability of glass objects, Hamid grew up bewildered by his scholarly father’s distant, sometimes severe behavior toward him. Young Hamid was likewise bemused by his father’s shift from opposing the shah to working for him. His father explained: “Slowly, slowly I became the system.” Ironically, the same became true for Hamid, as he reached his young manhood as an idealistic revolutionary seeking the shah’s overthrow. Soon he proved himself dedicated to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s republic by carrying out an appalling act of betrayal against his father, and over the succeeding decades he became deeply entrenched in his country’s draconian system of dispensing justice. One is often tempted while reading this novel to think of Hamid as little more than an introspective species of monster. But Sofer (The Septembers of Shiraz, 2007) brings compassion, insight, and acerbic humor to her depiction of a man at once too intelligent to altogether ignore the consequences of his behavior yet helpless to withstand the turbulent momentum of history.
A perceptive, humane inquiry into Iran's history and soul.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-11006-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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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. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE
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Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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