WHEN THE SMOKE CLEARS

In Edwards’ novel, a single, grieving mother discovers shocking secrets about her family and herself.

Nearly two years ago, Southern Californian Talia Brighton’s firefighter husband, Russ, died while battling a wildfire. She seeks help from a therapist after realizing she’s prone to walking—and, apparently, trail-running—in her sleep, leaving her 5-year-old daughter, Riley, alone in the house (“Oh God, it is happening again, she’d thought”). Her first meeting with Dr. Cohn, who reminds her of a Catholic nun from her youth, sends her mind spinning; from there, the novel travels across space and time but retains its consistent pacing and patience, pitched somewhere between a mystery and a thriller. As Talia takes her first steps to moving on with her life, she revisits, through a series of incisive flashbacks, her childhood in Australia. There, she and her older sister, Naomi, were orphaned under mysterious circumstances and taken to an orphanage by their Aunt Miriam; she returns five years later to pick up the girls, eventually taking them to Seattle to meet their paternal grandparents. Readers grow used to the book’s constant shimmering between past and present, although in one chapter Talia loops into so many flashbacks—while driving to the opera with her sister, while walking from their parking spot to the theater, and while watching the dancers in the first act—that it becomes frustrating, and the present-day story starts to feel insubstantial. Along the way, Talia recalls many things about her past, which whirls around her like the smoke and flames that claimed her husband. Overall, Edwards’ narrative asks intriguing questions: Must family history repeat itself? How does one judge others from past generations? The slow revelation of Talia’s family history is engaging enough to draw readers in and maintain their interest; the past never quite overwhelms the present, although it does obscure the future. At the end, readers take leave of Talia with several questions unanswered, but the fact that the smoke never fully clears may be the point.

A psychologically authentic quest into a complex history of love and grief.