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Michael Magras

FictionShort Stories

Your Duck Is My Duck

Review by Michael Magras

Come in contact with enough people, and inadvertently or otherwise, you’re bound to disappoint a few of them. Variations on the theme of disappointment link the six stories in Your Duck Is My Duck, Deborah Eisenberg’s first collection of new work since 2006’s Twilight of the Superheroes. It’s hard to imagine a more graceful depiction of lives filled with quiet desperation. As heartbreaking as these works may be, the beauty of the language and Eisenberg’s sympathy for her characters will win over readers.

And what beautifully drawn characters they are: an artist who accepts an offer from wealthy admirers to paint at their island retreat, only to discover that the island isn’t the paradise it seems; elderly actors from Hollywood’s golden age who gather in New York to grouse about a tell-all memoir written by the “putative grandson” of a famous director; a middle-aged woman who recalls three aunts she knew in her youth and her fraught relationship with her mother; and a recent college graduate who steals $10,000 from his unethical CEO father. This last character is featured in a story that also includes a researcher studying the origins of language and begins with the famously ironic boast—“I have the best words”—from the current White House occupant.

Eisenberg’s ability to dramatize family strife through small details has never been more acute, as when an aunt’s purchase of a baby doll for her niece intensifies the mother’s jealousy. And Eisenberg’s writing is glorious throughout, such as her description of a woman wearing “a little vintage sundress, the color of excellent butter.” A story about a teenager seeking a cure for episodes of confusion feels unfocused, but the other five are among the most astute works of short fiction this year. You may not like all the characters, but the book doesn’t disappoint.

Come in contact with enough people, and inadvertently or otherwise, you’re bound to disappoint a few of them. Variations on the theme of disappointment link the six stories in Your Duck Is My Duck, Deborah Eisenberg’s first collection of new work since 2006’s Twilight of the Superheroes. It’s hard to imagine a more graceful depiction of lives filled with quiet desperation. As heartbreaking as these works may be, the beauty of the language and Eisenberg’s sympathy for her characters will win over readers.

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Clockmaker’s Daughter

Review by Michael Magras

One of the enduring staples of fiction is the English country house. They are centerpieces of many novels, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Kate Morton puts one such house at the center of The Clockmaker’s Daughter.

The house, situated on the River Thames, is Birchwood Manor, with staircases that turn at odd angles and “wall panels with clever concealments.” The house also conceals a secret inhabitant: a ghost who once went by the name Lily Millington and who now spies on guests who periodically drop by.

Lily first came to Birchwood in July 1862, when aspiring artist Edward Radcliffe invited fellow anti-establishment types to the house for a summer of painting. He couldn’t have predicted the fateful night to come, a night that featured “[t]wo unexpected guests. Two long-kept secrets. A gunshot in the dark.” That gunshot took the life of Fanny Brown, Edward’s fiancée.

Cut to 2017, when Elodie Winslow is working as an archivist, caring for the former belongings of Victorian banker James Stratton. One day, she discovers a waxed cardboard box containing a document case belonging to Stratton and a sketchbook of Edward’s. Among the drawings is one of Birchwood Manor.

It turns out that the house has relevance to Elodie’s family. What follows is an intricate tale that involves an 8-year-old girl who grows up in Bombay before her English parents abandon her at Birchwood in 1899; a 1920s historian researching the story of Edward Radcliffe; and a present-day journalist in search of a gem known as the Radcliffe Blue.

The Clockmaker’s Daughter is overstuffed with incident, but readers who enjoy a symphony of voices and multiple storylines will find much to like here. Morton builds considerable drama as she unveils the secrets behind Fanny’s death, the gem and more. It’s an imaginative tale for fans of historical fiction.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One of the enduring staples of fiction is the English country house. They are centerpieces of many novels, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Kate Morton puts one such house at the center of The Clockmaker’s Daughter. The house, situated on the River Thames, is Birchwood Manor, with […]
FictionComic Fiction

French Exit

Review by Michael Magras

Whatever you do, don’t mess with Frances Price. If you’re a waiter, and the “moneyed, striking woman of sixty-five” who is the protagonist of French Exit enters your restaurant, make sure you’re polite to her, or she just might take out her perfume, spritz the centerpiece and set it on fire.

She has nice qualities, too—she gives money to charities and the homeless—but she’s also likely to leave for a ski holiday in Vail rather than contact the authorities when she discovers that her husband, a ruthless litigator, has died of cardiac arrest.

The tabloid scandal caused by her indifference hasn’t stopped her from living an extravagant Manhattan lifestyle since her husband’s death 20 years ago. But enforced austerity is about to begin. Her financial adviser tells her that the money she inherited has run out. Sell everything that isn’t nailed down, he tells her, and begin again.

When an old friend offers her the use of a Paris apartment, Frances reluctantly accepts. Soon, she’s sailing across the Atlantic with Malcolm, her 32-year-old kleptomaniacal “lugubrious toddler” of a son, and Small Frank, an elderly cat she is convinced houses the spirit of her late husband.

Patrick deWitt has great fun with this premise. He populates the story with such characters as Susan, the fiancée Malcolm leaves behind in New York; Madeleine, a medium who can tell when someone is about to die because they look green; and Madame Reynard, an American widow who befriends the Prices because of her fascination with the tabloid scandal.

If French Exit doesn’t always reach the zany heights it strives for, it’s still an entertaining portrait of people who are obsessed with the looming specter of death and who don’t quite feel part of the time they were born into.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Whatever you do, don’t mess with Frances Price. If you’re a waiter, and the “moneyed, striking woman of sixty-five” who is the protagonist of French Exit enters your restaurant, make sure you’re polite to her, or she just might take out her perfume, spritz the centerpiece and set it on fire.

FictionSatire

What fools these mortals be

Review by Michael Magras

Poor Jason Fitger. In Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher’s hilarious 2014 novel, Fitger is a tenured professor of English at the second-rate Payne University, where he has a dingy office by the bathroom, writes sardonic letters of recommendation and gripes about the school’s political in-fighting.

Life isn’t much better in The Shakespeare Requirement, Schumacher’s entertaining follow-up. Fitger is now the department chair, to the faculty’s dismay. That’s not his only problem: The university has renovated Willard Hall, but only for the Economics department, which now enjoys hot-and-cold water fountains and an espresso bar. English is stuck in the dilapidated lower floors, where Fitger has a “barbarically hot” office with “fossilized apple cores” under his desk and wasps in the windows.

That isn’t indignity enough for Roland Gladwell, the Economics chair. He wants to get rid of the English department entirely, so he convinces Phil Hinckler, dean of the university and Fitger’s ex-wife’s boyfriend, to let him chair a quality-assessment program that he hopes will help achieve his goal.

One of the ways English can survive is by submitting an acceptable Statement of Vision. This, too, poses problems, as the proposed statement eliminates the requirement that all students take a Shakespeare course, a change that infuriates the department’s Shakespeare scholar and becomes a cause célèbre among the student body.

The novel includes many colorful characters, among them Fitger’s assistant, Fran, who’d much rather be an animal behavior consultant, and Angela Vackray, a freshman who gets into trouble with a boy from her Bible study.

Schumacher’s humor can be broad—a centenary celebration is called “One Hundred Years of Payne”—but the book has more laugh-out-loud lines than most novels, and she wields cutting remarks that are as sharp as ever. The Shakespeare Requirement is a bitter delight, perhaps, but a delight nonetheless.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Poor Jason Fitger. In Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher’s hilarious 2014 novel, Fitger is a tenured professor of English at the second-rate Payne University, where he has a dingy office by the bathroom, writes sardonic letters of recommendation and gripes about the school’s political in-fighting.

FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine

Review by Michael Magras

Tolstoy would have approved: In the short story collection Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang) finds an impressively wide-ranging assortment of punishments to make 10 different families uniquely unhappy. Yet it’s a thrill to read these stories, proving yet again that even bleak material can be exciting in the hands of a great storyteller.

A summary of the tales in this collection might make you think the book is depressing overall. “A Visit” features an adult daughter returning to her childhood home after an intruder assaults her 82-year-old mother. In “A Signal to the Faithful,” an altar boy faints during church services. A couple’s 8-month-old son disappears in “The Lost Baby.” And in the book’s grisliest and best story, “Wildfire Johnny,” a man finds an ivory-handled razor that allows him to travel 24 hours back in time whenever he uses it to cut his own throat.

Children fare especially poorly in these often-macabre tales, all of them set in and around Tennessee. Among the suffering children are the siblings in “Scroll Through the Weapons” who live in squalor and whose mother has been arrested for stabbing her husband with a kebab skewer.

What makes Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine moving rather than lurid is Wilson’s compassion for his characters and his beautiful writing. He has a gift for heartbreaking detail, as when he mentions a box marked “Winter Coats” that contains the possessions of a grieving mother’s dead child. Despite the bleakness of these stories, there are glimmers of hope, or at least determination, as when one character says he’ll do what he can to “protect us from anything that tried to convince us that we would not live forever in happiness.” It’s a wise sentiment from a nuanced book.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Tolstoy would have approved: In the short story collection Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang) finds an impressively wide-ranging assortment of punishments to make 10 different families uniquely unhappy. Yet it’s a thrill to read these stories, proving yet again that even bleak material can be exciting in the hands of a great storyteller.

FictionPopular Fiction

Clock Dance

Review by Michael Magras

Deceptively simple prose is like a child with an adorable smile: They can both get away with a lot. In a career that began with 1964’s If Morning Ever Comes, Anne Tyler has created one deceptively simple novel after another. Her specialty is the depiction of quiet lives that may seem ordinary at first glance. Upon closer inspection, each book is a subtle analysis of American married life, its joys as well as its darker elements.

Tyler offers yet another astute portrait in Clock Dance. In 1967 Pennsylvania, 11-year-old Willa is the elder daughter of a mild-mannered father and a mother prone to disappearances and bursts of violence. The action then shifts to 1977, when college junior Willa flies home so that her boyfriend, Derek, can meet her parents. After a section set in 1997, in which Derek, now her husband, dies in a car accident, the second half of the book shifts to 2017. Willa is living in Arizona and married to retired lawyer Peter. One day, she gets a call from a stranger in Baltimore, who tells her that Denise, a former girlfriend of her elder son, has been shot in the leg. The woman, Denise’s neighbor, asks Willa to fly out to care for the victim’s 9-year-old daughter, Cheryl, whom the neighbor mistakenly thinks is Willa’s granddaughter.

Tyler fans won’t be surprised to learn that kind-hearted Willa agrees to the request. Her experiences with Denise and Cheryl make up much of the book’s drama. If the concluding pages are more circuitous than necessary, Tyler’s touch is as light and sure as ever. Clock Dance is a tender portrait of everyday people dealing with loss and regret, the need to feel useful and the desire for independence.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A heartwarming tale of found family
FictionHistorical Fiction

An elegant foray into Jean Rhys’ life

Review by Michael Magras

You won’t learn anything about her writing—the novel never mentions the title by which most readers know her, or any of her other works—but the Jean Rhys depicted in Caryl Phillips’ beguiling new novel, A View of the Empire at Sunset, is not unlike the poorly treated and subjugated female characters from some of Rhys’ own books, among them Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark.

Phillips, a native of the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and author of 2015’s magnificent The Lost Child, begins his tale in 1930s London. Gwendolen Williams (Rhys’ birth name) is unhappily married to her second husband, literary agent Leslie Tilden Smith. He has recently received a legacy from his late father. With the money, in the hope of repairing their relationship, he suggests a trip to Gwennie’s West Indies homeland, “for he understood how desperately she wished once again to see her birthplace.” 

From there, the novel goes back in time to Gwennie’s childhood on the island of Dominica. A series of vignettes follow her into adulthood and dramatize “her mother’s irrational fear of Negroes”; her time at a Cambridge boarding school, where English classmates ask questions such as, “Do you have monkeys in your family? I mean as relatives, not pets”; her attempts at a stage career; her relationships with many suitors; and her marriage to journalist Jean Lenglet, with whom she spends the 1920s in Paris and has two children, including a boy who dies at three weeks.

Readers of Phillips’ previous novels will recognize similar elements here, including the elegant formality of his prose and the criticisms of racism and colonialism. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a provocative portrait of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic authors.

You won’t learn anything about her writing—the novel never mentions the title by which most readers know her, or any of her other works—but the Jean Rhys depicted in Caryl Phillips’ beguiling new novel, A View of the Empire at Sunset, is not unlike the poorly treated and subjugated female characters from some of Rhys’ own books, among them Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark.

FictionWorld FictionLiterary Fiction

A freewheeling, endlessly entertaining journey

Review by Michael Magras

Readers who experience a quiet thrill upon discovering an exciting new novel are likely to encounter that sensation when they read Welcome to Lagos, Chibundu Onuzo’s second work of fiction (and her American debut), a fast-paced story of war refugees, militants and others fleeing conflict in modern- day Nigeria.

The book starts when Chike Ameobi, an officer stationed at a “barren army base” in the Niger Delta, deserts rather than participate in a mission he considers barbaric. Accompanying him is Private Yemi Oke, who shares Chike’s distaste for a commanding officer who wants to “string the scalps of his enemies into a belt.”

They begin a journey to Lagos in search of a better life. Along the way, several others join them, including Fineboy, a teenager who had joined the country’s militants to protest foreign countries taking Nigerian oil; 16-year-old Isoken, who is searching for her parents; and Oma, a woman escaping her wealthy husband, an oil industry employee who—as described in one of the novel’s many great lines—treats her like expensive shoes, “to be polished and glossed but, at the end of the day, to be trodden on.”

When they get to Lagos, they live under a bridge along with other impoverished Nigerians until Fineboy discovers an abandoned, furnished flat beneath a decrepit building. They learn that the flat belongs to Colonel Sandayo, Nigeria’s education minister, who is on the run after taking $10 million earmarked for the country’s failing schools.

Welcome to Lagos casts an entertainingly scathing eye on many aspects of Nigerian society, from oil-hungry corporations to ambitious reporters and the rivalries among ethnic groups. If some characters aren’t fully fleshed out, the novel’s breakneck pace and intricate plotting are nevertheless a treat to savor. This is a winning sophomore effort from a writer to watch.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Readers who experience a quiet thrill upon discovering an exciting new novel are likely to encounter that sensation when they read Welcome to Lagos, Chibundu Onuzo’s second work of fiction (and her American debut), a fast-paced story of war refugees, militants and others fleeing conflict in modern- day Nigeria.

FictionWorld FictionHistorical Fiction

Folklore steeped in Mozambique history

Review by Michael Magras

Ngungunyane, nicknamed the Lion of Gaza, was the last emperor to rule the southern half of Mozambique in the late 19th century. Portuguese forces defeated him in 1895, and he died in exile in the Azores islands in 1906. Mozambican novelist Mia Couto has taken this story as the basis for a fictionalized trilogy about “the last days of the so-called State of Gaza.” The first book of the trilogy is Woman of the Ashes, which was nominated for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

Couto incorporates a dual-narrative technique and fantastical elements in his work, most notably in Sleepwalking Land, his famous work about the 1977-1992 Mozambican Civil War. He employs a similar structure here. One narrator is 15-year-old Imani, a black girl who lives on land claimed by two opposing factions, the Portuguese and the Lion of Gaza’s forces. The other narrator is Sergeant Germano de Melo, a former prisoner for mutiny who is sent by Portugal to superintend its conquest. Unapologetic about his country’s colonialism, he recruits Imani to assist him in the village’s garrison. But when he develops romantic feelings for her, he fears that he may be losing his mind and that the attraction will compromise his mission.

Woman in the Ashes is the sort of novel in which fish fly through the air, the soil bears the footprints of angels, and a bundle of animal pelts hides a deep abyss. The tension flags at times, but the book’s richness stems from its recognition that many forms of conflict rend nations and their people. War and colonial oppression are among the most devastating, but tensions also flare between races, among compatriots and within families.

This is a wise and powerful novel about war and its consequences.

Ngungunyane, nicknamed the Lion of Gaza, was the last emperor to rule the southern half of Mozambique in the late 19th century. Portuguese forces defeated him in 1895, and he died in exile in the Azores in 1906. Mozambican novelist Mia Couto has taken this story as the basis for a fictionalized trilogy about “the last days of the so-called State of Gaza.” The first book of the trilogy is Woman of the Ashes, which was nominated for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

A celebration of a Filipino family

Review by Michael Magras

In the current political climate, the need for novels that cast light on the immigrant experience is greater than ever. Contemporary literature has had its share of such works in recent years, from Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers to Lesley Nneka Arimah’s magnificent story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. The latest is Elaine Castillo’s debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, a timely book about a prominent family from the Philippines and the circumstances that lead them to America.

The novel—its title a play on America Is in the Heart, a 1946 semi-autobiographical novel by Filipino-American author Carlos Bulosan—begins with Paz, who is studying to become a nurse. While still in the Philippines, she meets her future husband, Pol De Vera, a talented orthopedic surgeon and “the Don Juan of the hospital.” Once they move to California, their roles reverse: Paz becomes the family breadwinner, while Pol works as a security guard. Their lives change further when, in 1990, they invite Hero, their niece thought to have died years earlier, to stay with them on a tourist visa.

Hero’s story is the focus of the novel, as she develops a close friendship with Roni, the couple’s 7-year-old daughter, and accompanies Roni on visits to faith healers who seek to cure the child’s eczema. Hero begins a relationship with Rosalyn, the daughter of one of the healers.

Castillo incorporates snippets of the Tagalog, Ilocano and Pangasinan languages throughout her tale, and some of the novel’s most memorable scenes depict the decade Hero spends with an armed resistance group that fights against dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ government. If Castillo overdoes some details—she references food too often—America Is Not the Heart is still an earnest contribution to the ongoing discussion of immigrant life in America.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the current political climate, the need for novels that cast light on the immigrant experience is greater than ever. Contemporary literature has had its share of such works in recent years, from Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers to Lesley Nneka Arimah’s magnificent story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. The latest is Elaine Castillo’s debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, a timely book about a prominent family from the Philippines and the circumstances that lead them to America.

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

Fifty years of notoriety

Review by Michael Magras

In his marvelous novel The Stranger’s Child, Alan Hollinghurst spanned the 20th century to tell the story of an enigmatic poem and its relevance to generations of one family. He employs a similar structure in his new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, another multigenerational saga, this time focusing on the Sparsholts and the effect a highly public midcentury scandal has on their family and legacy.

The first of the novel’s five sections is set in 1940. Several Oxford classmates, many of them gay, belong to a literary society. The students become infatuated with David Sparsholt, an aspiring engineer whom they first encounter as he exercises in front of an open window, “a figure in a gleaming singlet, steadily lifting and lowering a pair of hand-weights.” David has a girlfriend, but the classmates wonder if that might be a smokescreen. One student convinces David to pose nude for a drawing. Another is determined to sleep with him.

The novel’s main character, however, is Johnny Sparsholt, David’s son. Readers first meet Johnny in the mid-1960s when, at age 14, he’s vacationing with his parents and eager to pursue a romance with Bastien, an exchange student who’s staying with Johnny’s family. During this holiday, a scandal involving David’s secret affair brings ignominy to the family. The notoriety of the scandal weighs on openly gay Johnny for the next 50 years, as he becomes a celebrated painter and interacts with many of the people from his father’s past.

Hollinghurst has a tendency to use dialogue too obviously to convey background information, but the Jamesian elegance and psychological acuity of his previous novels grace The Sparsholt Affair as well. This is a moving work from one of modern literature’s finest authors.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In his marvelous novel The Stranger’s Child, Alan Hollinghurst spanned the 20th century to tell the story of an enigmatic poem and its relevance to generations of one family. He employs a similar structure in his new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, another multigenerational saga, this time focusing on the Sparsholts and the effect a highly public midcentury scandal has on their family and legacy.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Two novellas on a theme

Review by Michael Magras

Asymmetry, Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday’s debut, is a pair of novellas with a unique narrative shift. What begins as the story of a 25-year-old editorial assistant in early-2000s New York turns into the tale of an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow on his way to Iraqi Kurdistan.

In Folly, the opening novella, Ezra Blazer, a novelist in his 70s who suffers from many ailments, passes on his knowledge of books and music to Alice, an editorial assistant with whom he is having an affair. In her spare time, Alice writes about “War. Dictatorships. World affairs.” In Madness, the second novella, economist Amar Ala Jaafari experiences firsthand the war and dictatorships that Alice writes about, especially during flashbacks to war-torn Iraq and when he encounters the casual racism of border control agents.

The first section of Asymmetry feels sketchy, but the novel gains considerable momentum in Madness. The prose becomes poetic and precise, as when Halliday writes that the bustle in Heathrow “had a kind of prolonged regularity to it, like a jazz improvisation that, for all its deviations, never loses its beat.”

Both novellas deal with insecurity and death, and Halliday draws connections between the two seemingly disparate stories in many ways. For example, in Madness, Amar refers to Saul Bellow’s line from Humboldt’s Gift: “Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.” The same reference appears in Folly.

In a third and final section, wherein the two novellas come together, Ezra tells an interviewer, “We have very little choice other than to spend our waking hours trying to sort out and make sense of the perennial pandemonium.” Asymmetry is a thoughtful look at many forms of disorder and the eternal struggle to reconcile them.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Asymmetry, Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday’s debut, is a pair of novellas with a unique narrative shift. What begins as the story of a 25-year-old editorial assistant in early-2000s New York turns into the tale of an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow on his way to Iraqi Kurdistan.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

A Yorkshire legend

Review by Michael Magras

One of the surprises on Britain’s Man Booker Prize shortlist last year was Elmet, the fine debut novel from Fiona Mozley. American readers now have the chance to experience the novel’s atmospheric writing and its vivid portrait of a family struggling to outrun its past.

As we learn from the Ted Hughes excerpt in the book’s epigraph, Elmet, where the novel is set, was “the last independent Celtic kingdom in England” that, centuries later, “were still a ‘badlands’, a sanctuary for refugees from the law.” Now part of modern-day Yorkshire, this area is still home to some shady characters. The narrator is 14-year-old Daniel, who lives with his older sister, Cathy, and their father, John, a “bearded giant” who once bare-knuckle boxed for money, in a bungalow that Daddy, as Daniel calls him, built from scratch in a copse far from the town where they used to live.

Cathy is the tougher sibling, rolling cigarettes and beating up schoolboys who try to assault her, while Daniel prefers to sit quietly under trees and learn about poetry from Vivien, a neighbor woman Daddy knows through the children’s mother, who was frequently absent during their early years.

The novel turns darker when a man named Price, an unscrupulous landlord, shows up at the bungalow. Price, whom Daddy once worked for, claims to hold the deed to the land Daddy built the house on and tells Daddy he has to work for him again if he wants to stay. As Daddy later tells his children, Price will cause “small nuisances” if they refuse.

The escalation of these nuisances constitutes much of Elmet’s drama. The gothic violence of the later pages is out of step with the earlier tone, but Elmet paints a memorable picture of fraught familial relationships and the perils of revenge.

One of the surprises on Britain’s Man Booker Prize shortlist last year was Elmet, the fine debut novel from Fiona Mozley. American readers now have the chance to experience the novel’s atmospheric writing and its vivid portrait of a family struggling to outrun its past.

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