Challenging and original—to paraphrase a line, narrative is structure and structure is everything.
This second installment in Gosselin’s Narravox saga blends experimental fiction with hard SF, thriller, and literary fiction elements.
After serving only one year of a 20-year sentence, Dr. Gregory Grahn is a free man bent on retribution against Dr. Emma Prescott, whom he blames for his incarceration. Prescott, who was falsely accused of murdering her husband in the previous entry in the series, suspects Grahn will pursue vengeance through the manipulation of algorithms that, when used correctly, can not only effect quantum teleportation between processors but also manipulate memory, time, and, ultimately, reality. Prescott, with the help of a small group of friends (including detective Samantha “Sam” Calloway), uses a top-secret containment chamber in Boston to try to stop Grahn. By turning language and cadence into signals, the various characters find themselves in different time periods, such as 1937 Nanjing, 1941 Russia, and Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. When a Russian soldier becomes entangled with one of these time shifts, ethical complications arise; Dmitri Sergeyevich Volkov believes he was gone from his family for a month, but four years have passed (“The chamber cut him out of time and dropped him into a life already lived”). Does Prescott intervene, or do nothing—and possibly put the Russian and his family in danger?
Gosselin’s novel has a nontraditional structure—this is not an easy or predictable read. It’s a literary puzzle that gives the reader very little insight into its backstory or even premise. Expected elements like character depth and dynamism, worldbuilding, and overall narrative clarity are all but nonexistent. The first few sentences provide an eye-opening indication of what readers are in for: “Three inputs register: bone, blur, nothing. The latch is wrong. Emma takes the contradiction and moves. Pen clicks. Doubt for a breath. Training holds. Hand off the latch. Door shut. Palm to steel. A tremor answers. Latch down. Two controlled breaths. Console steady. Occupied means sealed. Red stays red.” Unravelling the story is certainly challenging, and the lack of vital information throughout—such as characters’ full names, careers, and motivations—can make for a frustrating and confusing reading experience. But those who are able to follow the nebulous storyline will be rewarded with passages of austere literary beauty: “Lanes pinched toward water. Roofs rimed. Tar and fish in the air. A ropewalk unrolled like a long thought. Tar caulk in the seams. Windows dead. Quay boards whitened, frost in grain.” When the author (infrequently) moves to a more traditional storytelling style, the world comes alive with powerful imagery and descriptions: “Past the city: trenches iced over, birch peeled white by shelling, telegraph poles with missing teeth, chimneys like graves. Snow sifted from a low sky and melted into cinders. Barns leaned. Fields showed black ribs where tanks had turned the earth.” The thematic ingenuity here is that the characters can potentially change reality through language, cadence, and silence—and the novel itself serves as a mechanism to facilitate that change.
Challenging and original—to paraphrase a line, narrative is structure and structure is everything.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798272253941
Page Count: 275
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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