Set in war-torn Chechnya, Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena begins with terror. Russian soldiers burst into a house and abduct a man in the middle of the night, burning down his house and taking him somewhere no one ever returns from. His neighbor and longtime friend, Akhmed, watches helplessly until they leave, then races over to save what the soldiers left without: hiding in the snowy forest behind the house is his friend’s eight-year-old daughter, Havaa. Knowing that the soldiers will surely come back for her, Akhmed takes it upon himself to keep the girl safe.
Akhmed inadvertently makes a choice that will change everyone’s lives. His reasoning is initially unclear, but he decides that Havaa will be safe at the hospital in a nearby city. He knows of a skilled female surgeon there — unheard of in their culture — and he’s sure that if he can just get Havaa there, she’ll be safe. The reality of the situation is quite different. He does indeed encounter that female surgeon, Sonja, but she’s cold and arrogant. She’s the only doctor in the entire hospital; aside from her assistant and the security guard, everyone else fled years ago. The last thing she needs is a child running around. Still, by offering to help at the hospital, Akhmed manages to get her to agree.
Though the book technically only spans five days, it actually jumps back and forth from 1994 – 2004. Marra has created a complex web of relationships that extends far beyond their current situation; events that happened years ago set off numerous chain reactions that are finally manifesting themselves all these years later. Even secondary characters who have never met are somehow connected: Sonja’s beautiful and traumatized younger sister, Natasha; Ramzan, the village informant whom everyone shuns; Ramzan’s lonely father, Khassan, who must also bear the stigma of his son’s actions; and Dokka, Havaa’s father. So much is shrouded by loss, violence, and mystery.
I don’t think I ever fully appreciated how wacky Jonathan Franzen can be until I read Strong Motion. We see a lot of it in The Corrections and a little of it in Freedom, but by then he had become Jonathan Franzen, 
I Want to Show You More
The Guy’s Guide to Feminism
Tristan Hart is a wealthy and fiercely intelligent twenty-year-old who has been chosen to study medicine in London. Having been left to his own devices while growing up in the country, Tristan can’t wait to experience London and finally be challenged by one of the best minds in medicine. He won’t be completely left alone, though. Tristan has already experienced at least one violent episode that left his family fearing for his sanity. In London, he’ll be closely watched, lest he experience another “nervous” outburst. But Tristan harbors dark secrets about his personality that go much further than his mental stability. He’s obsessed with pain, especially inducing it. Studying medicine allows him to channel his interests productively, allowing him to cause pain (though surgery, etc.) in order to fix medical conditions. The problem is that as pressure on him increases, he has a harder time telling fantasy from reality, especially when the woman he loves is involved.
Bonaventure Arrow comes into the world without making a sound. The result of a whirlwind romance between two people deeply in love with each other, Bonaventure is born under painfully opposite circumstances. His young father was shot and killed just months before Bonaventure’s birth, and his mother is weighed down by grief and guilt. But Bonaventure has a secret: though he’ll never be able to speak, he has the ability to hear things no one else can.
Zombies, merciless shrinking spouses, and intergalactic warfare…just another typical day for the characters in Manuel Gonzales’s debut short story collection, The Miniature Wife: And Other Stories. The eighteen stories in this collection are at turns darkly humorous and really strange, throwing readers for a loop in very unexpected ways.
Yesterday, I wrote about Jennifer Haigh’s second novel, Baker Towers. Centered on the Novak family, the novel begins in the 1940s and focuses on small town America at its peak, then shows how economic hardships during the next three decades impacted the community. Most of the mines shut down, leaving much of the town unemployed. When we last see the remaining Novaks, Dorothy and her sister Joyce are settled in Bakerton and are doing what they can to put their youngest sister, Lucy, through college so she can get away and be successful. The two brothers have long since left. It’s a very open ending that leaves readers aching, considering everything the Novaks privately struggled with throughout the novel.
Baker Towers is a family saga set in the fictional town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania. It’s a small immigrant community that completely revolves around its one main industry, coal mining. The town is mostly separated by immigrant populations — Polish Hill, Swedetown, Little Italy — but pretty much everyone has ties to the mines and lives in company ho using. We first meet the Polish-Italian Novak family in the 1940s during a time of tragedy: Stanley Novak has suddenly died after returning from the mines. His wife, Rose, must now find a way to provide for the four children still living at home, Dorothy, Joyce, Sandy, and little Lucy; at the time of his father’s death, George is already oversees serving in the armed forces.
Alex Lyons is one of four writers for Chick Habit, a gossip blog that is quickly gaining a mass following. The writers are each required to score a total of one million hits a month, so the bitchier and more controversial their articles are, the more likely they are to draw page views. If a writer manages to find a juicy story, she might even luck out and have her post scheduled during the high-traffic lunch hour, when office workers across the city are surfing the web during their break while eating their sad desk salads.
