Dreamy and jarring and exceedingly topical.
On an unnamed island, a decade after the fall of a brutal dictator, a woman suspects that a prominent senator she knows from her past—a progressive star, a media darling—is guilty of his own private violence.
“Precisely a week after the death of Maria P. was declared an accident,” begins Novey’s (Ways to Disappear, 2016) sophomore novel, “a woman reached into her tote bag and found a sweater inside that didn’t belong to her.” The woman is Lena, a 30-something college instructor. The sweater bears an eerie resemblance to a sweater she used to wear, back when she too was a student activist, just like Maria P. before she was “accidentally” run over by a bus. Lena, though, is convinced Maria P. was murdered: She was pushed, Lena believes, by a hotshot senator named Victor, light of the nation’s Truth and Justice Party. Lena has some experience with this. She was once in the thrall of Victor, too. Meanwhile, in a bed elsewhere on the island, Victor has come up with a plan to ward off questions: Get married. And so he proposes to the well-connected woman beside him, who lovingly accepts. The first half of the book has the propulsion of a thriller, a whirlwind of characters and perspectives. There is Lena’s friend Olga, a victim of the regime who now runs a books-and-marijuana shop. There is Freddy, Victor’s gay playwright brother, who has his own suspicions. There is Oscar, a northern tourist bearing baked goods. And then, of course, there’s Lena, haunted by Maria P. and the years she spent in silence. What follows is a tangled web of loss and regret and—perhaps—something like redemption. It's not a particularly subtle book—after the initial setup, it unfurls more or less how you’d expect it to—but Novey’s writing is so singularly vibrant it hardly matters.
Dreamy and jarring and exceedingly topical.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-56043-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An unusual and stylish story of love and murder—less a mystery than a study of emotions and cultural mores.
In Japan, a daughter explores the crime of passion that took her mother’s life.
Sumiko was just 7 when her mother died and her father moved away; she was raised by her grandfather, who has always maintained that her mother was killed in a car accident. Twenty years later, she answers a phone call meant for him from a prison administrator with information about inmate Kaitarō Nakamura; when the caller realizes whom she is speaking with, she hangs up. With just this detail, Sumiko begins an obsessive quest. She turns up an article headlined “WAKARESASEYA AGENT GOES TOO FAR?” from which she learns that Kaitarō Nakamura was an agent in the “marriage breakup” industry. He was hired by her father to seduce her mother in order to provide grounds for divorce. Nakamura claims that he and her mother had fallen in love and were about to start a new life together. When Sumiko visits Nakamura's defense attorney, the woman hands over all her files and videotaped interviews with her client. Weaving through the story of Sumiko’s search and her recollections of her childhood is the story of her mother and her lover, from the moment he pretended to meet her accidentally at the market and moving inexorably to the murder scene. Scott is a Singaporean British writer born and raised in Southeast Asia; her debut is inspired by a 2010 case in Tokyo and based on years of research. The book proceeds slowly, lingering on enjoyable details of Japanese landscape and food but perhaps not adding enough new information to maintain the level of interest set by the sensational details in the first pages.
An unusual and stylish story of love and murder—less a mystery than a study of emotions and cultural mores.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54470-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.
After stretching the boundaries of fiction in myriad ways (including a short story written in Tweets), Pulitzer Prize winner Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010, etc.) does perhaps the only thing left that could surprise: she writes a thoroughly traditional novel.
It shouldn’t really be surprising, since even Egan’s most experimental work has been rich in characters and firmly grounded in sharp observation of the society around them. Here, she brings those qualities to a portrait of New York City during the Depression and World War II. We meet 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her adored father, Eddie, to the Manhattan Beach home of suave mobster Dexter Styles. Just scraping by “in the dregs of 1934,” Eddie is lobbying Styles for a job; he’s sick of acting as bagman for a crooked union official, and he badly needs money to buy a wheelchair for his severely disabled younger daughter, Lydia. Having rapidly set up these situations fraught with conflict, Egan flashes forward several years: Anna is 19 and working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, the sole support of Lydia and their mother since Eddie disappeared five years earlier. Adult Anna is feisty enough to elbow her way into a job as the yard’s first female diver and reckless enough, after she runs into him at one of his nightclubs, to fall into a one-night stand with Dexter, who initially doesn’t realize whose daughter she is. Disastrous consequences ensue for them both but only after Egan has expertly intertwined three narratives to show us what happened to Eddie while drawing us into Anna’s and Dexter’s complicated longings and aspirations. The Atlantic and Indian oceans play significant roles in a novel saturated by the sense of water as a vehicle of destiny and a symbol of continuity (epigraph by Melville, naturally). A fatal outcome for one appealing protagonist is balanced by Shakespearean reconciliation and renewal for others in a tender, haunting conclusion.
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1673-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
