Here be icebergs

These haunting stories from Adaui (Geography of Obscurity) explore the pain of familial strife. In "This Is the Man," a young boy is repeatedly molested by his older cousin in their grandmother's garage. He hides his trauma from his mother for nearly a decade, and when he finally tells her, she offers little consolation, saying, "Family is family." "Lovebird" follows a woman who, struggling to cope with her father's suicide two months after her mother's death, sets out to win over a new neighbor by buying her a pet bird. Deaf twins choose assisted suicide after they find out they are going blind in "The Hamberes Twins," receiving their mother's anguished approval: "For my sons, the idea of never seeing each other again is the only unbearable pain." "That Horse" depicts a young girl pondering mortality after watching an injured horse get put to death, while "Alaska" traces the movements of the narrator's ancestors from Italy to Peru to the U.S. and back again. Adaui's poetic prose elevates the poignancy of these mostly somber stories ("The heart, a trawl net in deep waters, hunts without knowing what it's caught"). This one will stick with readers long after they finish the last page. (June)

Childhood is the dangerous terrain of an inhospitable landscape in these short stories by Lima-born writer Adaui. As two girls chat by a pool, the nearby adults think how lovely and relaxed they are. "They're wrong," the narrator says. "We're practising how to endure everything life has in store for us." In this collection, pain and misunderstandings echo through generations. Parents beat and blame their children and later demand to be respected. "You know why I'm so hard on you, don't you?" a mother asks her daughter. "So that you'll be the strongest of all my children." In one tale, a family is terrorized by an unseen monster that bombards the house with fruit, their claustrophobic fear heightened by the suspicion that one of them is responsible. "Against all odds, we survived Christmas," begins a story about a family outing to the beach that ends at a police station; "Not for anything in the world would I be one year old again," the narrator says, "and live through everything I've lived through before now." In another story, also featuring a harrowing drive, a young man remembers his mother telling him, "Getting through childhood is to survive the worst of all tsunamis." Adaui's stories tend to begin in medias res, with much left unstated, the text only the visible part of a looming iceberg. Along with violence and threats of violence are rarer moments of appreciation and clarity. About the boyhood of one character and his friends: "It was a period when we cried seldom and felt a great deal." An imprisoned politician with time on his hands finds solace planting trees: "All mornings repeated themselves in the only verb it was possible to conjugate: to wait." In one tale, family history is arranged around locations on a map, "a fragmented story--none is linear--emerging," a description which fits the book as a whole. A kaleidoscopic collection that takes a sharp, dark look at family and how we survive it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.