Fiction Five: Facing Adversity

A brother. A mother. A father. A child. Each of these new novels’ central characters have lost someone close to them. How they navigate that trauma is different in every case. This month’s grief-tinged selections include heartbreak, healing, withdrawal and reconnection, but maybe also some intrigue and a few laughs.

Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven

When Sally Samuelson was 8 years old, her brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. While Ellis was eventually found at Bug Hollow, a community of counter-culturalists left over from the 70s, he tragically died in an accident weeks later.

From that point, the world of the Samuelsons is thrown out of alignment. Ellis’s pregnant girlfriend from the commune arrives. Sybil avoids the pain of losing her son by pouring herself into her work and a developing addiction. Her husband, Phil, finds solace in a foreign love interest. Their daughter Katie returns home after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally devotes herself to the care of Eva, the child Ellis never knew.

With empathy and piercing insight, Huneven offers a glimpse of a family attempting to rebuild after tragedy.

“This transcendent novel has all the virtues associated with Huneven: attention to detail and a glimpse at how complicated the very act of living is... Readers of Elizabeth Strout or Mary Gaitskill will love this book. Huneven hits it out of the ballpark again.” — Library Journal

Flashlight by Susan Choi

One night, 10-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone, presumed drowned.

Shifting from one family member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless sexual adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.

“In this superbly crafted book, the fraught geopolitics of family life―the official secrets, the acts of espionage, the diplomatic failures―are set against the intimacies, grievances, conflicting memories, and unmet needs of national allegiance. Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last.” ― Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood

Waterline by Aram Mrjoian

The Kurkjians received news Mari, the eldest of their youngest generation, swam into Lake Michigan with no intent of returning to shore. The consequences drag out a deeply rooted pain passed down from generations before.

More than a century earlier, Gregor, the great-grandfather and patriarch of the Kurkjian family, survived the Armenian Genocide. In the present day his epic mythos is inherited by his family as they navigate living in its shadow, decades later and miles away.

As the Kurkjians struggle with their new, devastating loss, secrets and shortcomings rise to the surface. Waterline is a searing portrait of a family afloat in grief and the perseverance needed to rise above.

"Waterline is a moving portrait of grief and the shadows of silence. Aram Mrjoian shines a piercing and wise light on the way the members of one Armenian family care for and alienate each other with their secrets, and asks the question, how do we keep loving through unspeakable loss?" — Vanessa Chan, bestselling author of The Storm We Made

The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward

After their mother vanished into the Thames, twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have struggled to relate to one another. In adulthood they are content to be all but estranged until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life. It's the very life, it seems, she might have had if the girls had never been born.

Clara, a celebrity author in desperate need of validation, believes Serene is their mother. While Dempsey, isolated and content to remain so, believes she is a con woman. As they clash over this stranger, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts — together.

"An inventive novel about family from a risk-taking writer. Daley-Ward explores the tension between the twins beautifully.... The novel ends with a genuine shock, but it’s earned―it’s a surprising conclusion to a beautifully written and structured book. Elegant and unpredictable in the best possible way." ― Kirkus Reviews

There Are Reasons for This by Nini Berndt

Lucy’s brother, Mikey, is dead. Two years ago when he left their small Eastern Colorado town and moved west to Denver he’d intended to bring Lucy along. But Lucy has only just arrived and it's too late. She arrives in search of Helen, a woman Mikey loved. But when Lucy moves in across the hall she finds nothing is as she expected.

As Helen’s and Lucy’s lives become more entwined Lucy begins to realize the real reasons she came to Denver are deeper and stranger than a simple desire to understand what happened to her brother. As a storm builds and the city falls apart Lucy finds herself drawn further to Helen, and farther from her brother. She is questioning what makes a family and if love can ever really be found.

"Nini Berndt wonderfully makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. There Are Reasons for This immerses you in the unsettling but tender lives of its characters, whose yearning for connection powerfully mirrors our own. This is a truly memorable novel." ― Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History