A memorable, cerebral tale with a frenzied mind and a big heart.
A Sri Lankan exchange student joins an unusual French band in this debut literary novella.
Migara de Silva is just trying to sell his blood. But the Sri Lankan law student has only been in France for six weeks and barely understands the language. When he shows up at the address mentioned in the ad, he discovers it’s actually an audition for a rock group called The Loneliest Band in France. The members—Noël, Guy, Lucien, and Michel—quickly ask Migara to join despite his total lack of musical experience or ability. Not only join, in fact, but play with them that very night at a contest at the Café Bovary, where they plan to unveil a deadly song that will change the music landscape forever. The song “caused its listeners to first lose their skin, their flesh peeling away from their bones in long, unwieldy strips, go mad, and ultimately die, or in any case this is what they believed would occur, never having played it in public.” Migara—or Paul, as he introduces himself to the band members—decides to take them up on their offer. It’s just the thing to break him out of his malaise: the expectations of his father, the alienation he feels abroad, the smallness of the life waiting for him back home. But does he really want to participate in violence? And what will come after it? The vast majority of Fisher’s novella is made up of three run-on sentences, which gives the prose a frenetic, breathless, tumbling quality: “And I wondered if this was still them, if this was the song, for, yes, I heard a harmonica playing, a trumpet, drums, vocals, guitar, all the right component pieces, but it was not what I expected, was not the tone I thought I would hear.” The author offers a surreal setting in which the birds have learned to talk (though they, like the narrator, are often caught between languages) and the exterior world is so fused to Migara’s interiority that it’s difficult to know just what is real and what isn’t. Yet beneath the structural and absurdist conceits, there is an impressive and fairly universal story about a son, his father, and the weight of discovering what to do with one’s life.
A memorable, cerebral tale with a frenzied mind and a big heart.Pub Date: March 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68003-212-3
Page Count: 70
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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