BURNING THE SEA

A confident and powerfully voiced first novel in which a couple—damaged, haunted and desperate—find redemption.

Having both just arrived at the airport in the Dominican Republic, Tollomi rescues Michelle from a customs nightmare. After this meeting, the two are inseparable, becoming more than friends and less than confidantes, sharing an enigmatic bond they’re afraid to speak of. Young and seemingly independent, Michelle has been traveling aimlessly, escaping something (even she’s not sure what—she suffers an amnesia that has erased chunks of her past and bits of her present), landing in the Dominican Republic to claim the house her grandparents bought in the ’40s on a whim. Tollomi, West Indies–born, American educated, travels the world helping the dispossessed, barely acknowledging his own exile from the island of his birth. To others, the pair seems charming and bright, but they can see each other for what they are—Tollomi being beckoned by mermaids to drown, Michelle followed by the ghost of her grandfather. She finds a job at an American bar and begins rebuilding her house, while Tollomi searches for the remains of a revolutionary movement that seems to have died with the assassination of its leader. He meets Carlitos, a young man selling sodas on the beach, and the two begin a doomed affair in the midst of burning gringo hotels and a fixed presidential election. As Michelle’s house nears completion, she becomes increasingly disturbed. Though suspecting the truth about her memory loss, Tollomi is too consumed with Carlitos (who may have ties to the torched hotels) to help her. The narrative is remarkably assured in weaving the futility of the revolutionary arsonists’ deeds (none of the hotels are really damaged, being made of cinderblock) with the futility of Michelle and Tollomi’s continuing to believe nothing is wrong with the other. A dramatic conclusion brings the chance of new life for both.

Smart, edgy, well written: an impressive first.