Review by New York Times Review
DIRECTORATE S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Steve Coll. (Penguin, $18.) Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, delves into the miscalculations that guided military campaigns in Afghanistan after 9/11. Washington's strained relationships with the Afghan and Pakistani governments only exacerbated the problems, Coll writes in his excellent, engrossing account. THE FRIEND, by Sigrid Nunez. (Riverhead, $16.) After the suicide of a friend, an unnamed writer living in a tiny apartment inherits his Great Dane. The arrival of the dog - whose size ^ matches the despair she feels - helps allay her sorrow, and the book expands to include meditations on sex, mentorship and the writing life. Nunez's charming novel won the National Book Award in 2018. WE CROSSED A BRIDGE AND IT TREMBLED: Voices From Syria, by Wendy Pearlman. (Custom House/Morrow, $16.99.) Between 2012 and 2016, Pearlman visited Syrian refugees across the Middle East and Europe and collected their stories of the war. Translated and shaped into a narrative by Pearlman, the accounts are a formidable contribution to the body of literature about this nearly-eight-year war. TRENTON MAKES, by Tadzio Koelb. (Anchor, $16.95.) In 1940s New Jersey, a wife kills and dismembers her abusive husband, assumes his identity and carries on living as a man. To complete the transformation, "Abe" finds work in a factory, remarries and even manages to impregnate his new wife. Our reviewer, William Giraldi, called the book "a novel of bewitching ingenuity, one whose darkling, melodic mind conceives a world of ruin and awe, a sensibility cast in sepia or else in a pall of vying grays." WHO WE ARE AND HOW WE GOT HERE: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, by David Reich. (Vintage, $16.95.) The Harvard scientist uses information extracted from ancient DNAto explain new, and occasionally shocking, facts about our ancestors. The book reconstructs the histories of modern Europeans, Indians, Native Americans, East Asians and Africans, and later, takes up the contentious subjects of race and identity. HAPPINESS, by Aminatta Foma. (Grove, $16.) In London, a Ghanaian psychologist and an American studying the city's foxes collide on a bridge, and their ensuing friendship is deepened by the private grief they each carry. As our reviewer, Melanie Finn, put it, "Forna's finely structured novel powerfully succeeds on a more intimate scale as its humane characters try to navigate scorching everyday cruelties."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 11, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The overarching message tucked into Scottish and Sierra Leonian writer Forna's (The Hired Man, 2013) quietly resonant novel is this: every living thing is the net sum of its history, and we carry the weight of our past on our shoulders. Atilla, a renowned Ghanian psychiatrist, is ostensibly in London to deliver a keynote speech, but he also has personal motives. He wants to check in on his friends' daughter, who he worries has come unmoored, and ensure that his first love, struck by early-onset Alzheimer's, is comfortable as she prepares to die. In a chance encounter he meets Jean, an American zoologist who studies urban foxes, and the two cultivate a tenuous relationship. Having specialized in war trauma, Atilla is weighed down by his battle scars and grief and guilt over his wife's early death. Jean is coming to terms with her divorce and a growing distance from her only child. Intricately woven into this tangled web are both the history of urban wild animals and Atilla's experience in war zones, as the story subtly shifts in and out of focus between the past and the present. If at times slightly diffuse, Forna's novel is ultimately a mesmerizing tale studded with exquisite writing.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This elegant novel from Forna (The Memory of Love) opens with a chance encounter: Ghanaian psychiatrist Attila Asare and American urban wildlife biologist Jean Turane collide while walking across London's Waterloo Bridge. Normally dispatched to war zones for his expertise in post-traumatic stress disorder, Attila is in town to speak at a conference. Jean lives there and researches the city's foxes. After a second encounter on the bridge, Attila offers to buy Jean a drink at his hotel bar and reveals that he had a secondary reason to come to London: to locate the teenage son of a friend who might have been swept up by immigration officials. Jean volunteers to help and eventually organizes a search to find the young runaway. A diverse cast of supporting characters (many of whom are West African immigrants) and Forna's rich descriptions of London make the novel potent and immersive. With their professional expertise and contemplative personalities, the protagonists offer wisdom on the nature of cruelty, the fear of the untamable, and the challenge of defining normality. The occasional bit of awkward dialogue and a convoluted plot will strain some readers' patience. Despite a reliance on coincidence to drive her narrative, Forna's gift for characterization allows her to ask genuine, practical questions about the delicate problems of the human condition in this ambitious novel. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The paths of two peoplean American woman who studies the habits of urban foxes and a Ghanaian man specializing in refugee traumacross in London, creating a fork in the road for both.Shot through with history, biology, and psychiatry, Forna's (The Hired Man, 2013, etc.) fourth novel is an unusual work that characteristically integrates multiple layers with fluidity. Its central characters are divorced wildlife biologist Jean Turane, in London working for a local council, and noted psychiatrist Attila Asare, a widower, who's arrived to give the keynote speech at a conference. Both have devoted their working lives to interpreting behavior and response, whether human or animal. Jean's context is the American history of settlement, wolf-hunting, and survival; Attila's the international geography of war. One accidental encounter on Waterloo Bridge, when Jean runs into Attila while chasing a fox, leads to more time spent together; meanwhile, Attila is searching for two missing family members and trying to help an old lover now afflicted by early-onset Alzheimer's disease, and Jean is drawn into a metropolitan fox-culling controversy. These far-from-sensational events, spanning some 10 days, are interrupted by more dramatic interludes set in Bosnia, New England, Iraq, and elsewhere, offering glimpses of Jean's and Attila's pasts: work done, risks taken, pain experienced. Forna's sensitive novel is nonostentatious yet compelling, and whether writing of Attila's victims of conflict and terror or Jean's birds and mammals, she offers wisdom and perspective, which is further extended to the possibility of romance between two questing strangers.Low-key yet piercingly empathetic, Forna's latest explores instinct, resilience, and the complexity of human coexistence, reaffirming her reputation for exceptional ability and perspective. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
