Nahai’s boisterous, sardonic, sometimes-lurid portrait of a community and the devil in its midst offers unusual, engrossing...
An energetically inventive epic, wrapped in a murder mystery, paints a broad picture of rapaciousness and revenge within the Iranian Jewish community of Los Angeles.
Confidently shepherding multiple characters over many decades and across two continents, Nahai (Sunday’s Silence, 2001, etc.) delivers a long, dark, broad–brush stroke saga that doubles as a primer to the 3,000-year-old history of the Jewish people of Iran. In her opening sentence she introduces the monster at the center of events, Raphael’s Son, found with his throat slashed in 2013. This beast of cruelty and deceit has many enemies, not least because of the gigantic Ponzi scheme he has been running that collapsed in 2008 but has left him apparently unpunished and no less wealthy. Then the story loops back to Raphael’s Son’s origins in 1950s Tehran. There, the Soleyman family has amassed great wealth, but owing to his sleepwalking, mysteriously glowing heart and bad health, eldest son Raphael will not live to inherit. Instead, his brother Aaron shoulders responsibility for the family’s money, to the fury of Raphael’s wife, known as the Black Bitch of Bushehr. Despite the impossible timing, she insists that her child is Raphael’s son and heir to the Soleyman fortune. This obsessive claim will lead to kidnapping, murder and much misery, until the Iranian revolution arrives, replacing old outrages with appalling new ones. Aaron’s widow flees to the United States, as does the unscrupulous Raphael’s Son, who has garnered a fortune from extortion. A second act of crime and punishment is played out in California among a close group of refugees who may have begun new lives but cannot escape the long reach of their histories, and that includes Raphael’s Son himself.
Nahai’s boisterous, sardonic, sometimes-lurid portrait of a community and the devil in its midst offers unusual, engrossing storytelling.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61775-321-3
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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