In Stone’s latest bulletin from the dark side of the human condition, brilliant college student Maud Stack is having an affair with her English advisor, Steve Brookman, whose wife, Ellie, is expecting their second child. When Steve tries to distance himself from Maud, it leads to tragedy. The book is not so much a whodunit as an expressionistic collage of how others in this New England college town deal with the tragic event. They include college counselor Jo Carr, a former nun in South America who is haunted by clashes between people stuck in a “struggle toward mutual extermination”; Maud’s widower father, Eddie, a Queens detective; Lou Salmone, the local cop who has to make sense of the senseless; and Shell Magoffin, Maud’s roommate, who is being stalked by her ex. A “thuggish” academic, Steve may not be the most believable character, and Ellie’s response to his infidelity might not be the most credible. But Stone (Damascus Gate) imbues his characters with a rare depth that makes each one worthy of his or her own novel. With its atmosphere of dread starting on page one, this story will haunt readers for some time. Agent: Neil Olson, Donadio & Olson. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

Eamonn Lynch is recently separated from his longtime girlfriend Laura and is living alone in the couple’s rundown condo in the ramshackle real-estate development of Lomaverde, Spain. About the last person he expects to see there is his father, Dermot, who’s on a fortnight’s holiday from Birmingham, England. Dermot, hoping for a change of scene following his wife’s death and his recent retirement from his job as a bus driver, finds himself drawn to the dilapidated area, which reminds him of the Ireland of his childhood. Much to Eamonn’s discomfort, Dermot is embraced by the other Lomaverde residents, British expatriates who feel trapped and resentful over being stuck with worthless property following Spain’s economic downturn. O’Flynn (What Was Lost) skillfully balances absurdity with pathos, both in Eamonn’s particular situation and in that of Lomaverde itself. Lomaverde, which one character calls “a place where you can admit to mistakes—you have no choice but to,” offers father and son the chance to repair themselves, if not their surroundings. Like her characters, O’Flynn has an eye for the beauty to be found amid squalor and chaos. Agent: Lucy Luck, Lucy Luck Associates. (Oct.)

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Set in the small town of Murn, Ireland, Murphy’s strong second novel (after John the Revelator) introduces Enoch O’Reilly, an ex-seminarian who doesn’t believe in God but prays to Elvis. As a child, Enoch decided to become a radio preacher after hearing a sermonizing program, Holy Ghost Radio, on his father’s private basement radio. Enoch has the personality to carry this off and doesn’t mind making up sensational tripe to entertain an audience, and his own Holy Show is a big draw—until he delivers an earnest sermon about the great river Rua, the book’s other main character, and the sermon is poorly received. Murphy expands the narrative with vignettes about Murn’s troubled inhabitants, among them a woman who drowns herself in the Rua, a boy who “takes fit” (has seizures), and a troubled arsonist. Murphy’s language is powerful, and in particular uses wavelike repetition to good effect: “Maybe a man’s beloved did not love him. Maybe a man could not bear how the world had turned pallid.... Maybe a man’s mind burned until the fever of it, the heat of it, turned his soul to char.” Agent: Marianne Gunn O’Connor, Marianne Gunn O’Connor Literary Agency (Sept.)

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The pivotal moment in Anguilla’s fight for independence, as Kobbé tells it in his debut novel, was the uncertain night 16 Anguillans spent at sea in a 35-foot sloop, the Rambler, on their way to attack neighboring St. Kitts. The events of June 9, 1967, bookend a narrative that unspools the tiny Caribbean island’s history of subjugation. Anguillans, then subjects of the British associated state of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, lived cut off from the world: no electricity, no telephone lines, no ports. Kobbé interweaves backstories of the chief populist leaders—the diplomatic Alwyn Cooke and the hot-tempered Rude Thompson—while capturing how news of the grassroots uprising spread from person to person “like a virus.” Colorful detours into native lore, such as a rich Dutchman’s fabled courtship of a local beauty, strike grace notes that echo Marquez. But Kobbé, who is Venezuelan by birth, falls short of another bestselling Hispanic novelist, Junot Diaz: this narrator’s heavy-handed foreshadowing and stilted interjections want for the linguistic verve of a Yunior. Even so, readers who stick with the Rambler as it drifts in the waves will be rewarded with the little-known tale of how the underdog country demanded its own place in the 20th century. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

A teenager comes of age and grapples with the heavy burdens of family secrets against the backdrop of the 19th-century New England whaling industry in this beautifully written, playful, and intricate debut novel. Fifteen-year-old Mercy Rathbone’s father, a whaler, has been away from home for nearly a decade, but Mercy holds out hope for his return. She happens to witness her mother coupling with a stranger, a scene that prompts Mercy and her cousin Mordecai to flee their home in panic. They embark on a journey of discovery that leads her to the truth about her missing brother and the rest of her family (the inclusion of several family trees with ever-spreading branches is a nice visual companion to the prose). Mercy’s travels alternate with flashbacks depicting her ancestors, beginning in 1761, with Moses, the first Rathbone, who had the gift of spotting a whale before any sign of it was visible. Clark creates evocative descriptions (a whale’s carcass is a “diminished hulk of patched black and rotted gray”), making her images and encounters between people especially vivid. Agent: Mollie Glick, Foundry Literary + Media. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

In order to inherit his fortune, a young 18th-century Englishman must provide his godfather, a staid country gentleman, detailed accounts of his erotic adventures, in Irwin’s debut novel. One could hardly call 23-year-old Richard Fenwick innocent when he returns to England from abroad, yet his godfather’s request that he describe his ongoing sexual conquests and darkest passions begins a series of seductions, indulgences, debaucheries, and betrayals that delineate Richard’s descent into vice and crime, to the voyeuristic delight of his patron. A la Tom Jones, the hero carouses with aptly named characters like Crocker, Horn, and Pike, finds himself in back streets and drawing rooms, and enjoys the occasional tumble in the grass between efforts to win over a particularly virtuous woman. Using language that resonates with the music and manners of the time, Irwin, a Fielding scholar, contrasts pastoral and graphic scenes, proper and pornographic passages, and high-minded theory and base practice. His knowledge of 18th-century social customs, values, and hypocrisies is impressive, but his ardent fantasies are likewise reminiscent of the past: the secret spyhole, the masquerade ball, the jealous husband lurking around the site of his cuckolding, all suggest male-perspective bodice-ripping as much as they reflect the satirical classics whose raunchy romanticism Irwin attempts so earnestly to recapture. Agent: Annette Green, Annette Green Authors’ Agency (U.K.). (Aug.)

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A disillusioned young schoolteacher drops out of his profession to enjoy a summer fling while trying to find himself in Cooper’s over-familiar debut novel. Brad Shepherd, 28, has been teaching junior high school math for five years in St. Louis, Mo., when one of his students, overdosing on Oxycontin, collapses and dies in his classroom. Shep, embittered after the school administration pressures him to quietly resign, defies his controlling mother by deciding to spend the summer in the touristy Ohio village of Put-in-Bay, located on South Bass Island in Lake Erie. Through a bartender friend, Haley, he meets the colorful party boy Cinch Stevens, a bouncer at Haley’s bar, the Round House. Cinch gets Shep a job working alongside him, and also, as the local drug dealer, gets him involved with cocaine, initially as a user and eventually as a dealer. Few readers will be surprised by the feckless hero’s subsequent downward trajectory, or that he finds romance with beautiful graduate student Astrid and a mentor in worldly Caldwell, a mandolin player and reputed Vietnam vet. Cooper writes serviceable prose but seldom finds anything to set this particular story of one man’s path to maturity apart from countless other coming-of-age tales. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

In this collection of 10 empathetic short stories, Okparanta chronicles life in her native Nigeria and the immigrant experience in America. Her characters mostly hail from Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State, where, in “On Ohaeto Street,” a woman revises her image of her wealthy husband after a violent burglary. “Story, Story!” features a childless teacher who slowly—and chillingly—reveals her real interest in the pregnant woman she befriends. In “America,” a female science teacher has an affair with another woman and faces a choice between two different ways of life. The later stories relocate to America, mainly Boston, where, in “Shelter,” a Nigerian woman trying to free herself and her daughter from the woman’s abusive husband runs into the indifference of local social workers. In “Designs,” a Nigerian student is torn between his childhood sweetheart and his American girlfriend. And in “Tumours and Butterflies,” a high school teacher is sucked back into her abusive father’s orbit after he’s diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Okparanta skillfully introduces readers to a new world held back by old-world traditions, but a sameness to her stories, which typically involve teachers, students, same-sex relationships, and abuse, makes the focus of this collection too constricted. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

Paris is the place where Willow “Willie” Pears can finally live near her brother Luke, who’s moved there with his boyfriend after years in China. She’ll teach poetry, try to get over her mother’s death, and, as the story begins, volunteer at a political asylum center, helping teenage girls practice their English while they wait for their court dates. That’s where she meets attorney Macon Ventri. Willie, as she tells us, has an “eager face” that makes her “hard to deny.” The same could be said of the book; it’s tenderhearted, earnest, and sincere in ways that make it hard to deny, even when Willie gets over-involved with Gita, one of the asylum seekers, and is surprised at the trouble she causes; or when it takes Willie and the other characters much too long to diagnose Luke’s persistent cough and exhaustion. As Conley (The Foremost Good Fortune) draws her, Willie may be a bit precious, but she’s also a true believer—not only in poetry but in love—and the heart of the book is the interlocking love stories, between Willie and the almost-to-good-to-be-true Macon, as well as between sister and brother, daughter and mother, and Willie and her asylum-seeking student. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Gernert Company. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

Lynn’s latest (after Now You See It) is an introspective domestic drama of a family battered by the rising cost of living. Even “normal people” like Wall Street M&A man Nate Bedecker, earning just under half a million annually, can no longer afford to live in Manhattan. Priced out of the Upper East Side apartment he shares with girlfriend Emily, who worked in advertising before the birth of their 10-month-old son, they head to Newport, R.I., where prospects await. But the new life they’d hoped for gets off to a bad start when their Jeep—containing all their possessions—is stolen, leaving them stranded at a luxury hotel with only $84 in cash. Over the next four days, Emily is racked with guilt over another theft—her own—of a painting belonging to her affluent New York friends. And Nate fears he may have inherited the Huntington’s disease gene from his estranged father and passed it on to his son. When New York City police arrive with questions about stolen art, and Nate’s father gets in a serious car crash, the weekend takes a tragic turn, forcing the exiles to finally face their issues. Lynn’s new novel rings with truth and compassion. Agent: Lane Zachary, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink