It is hard to believe Miroslav Penkov is younger than I am, born in 1982, when the experience of reading him is akin to reading the authors of Western classics. I have the simultaneous feeling of being deeply immersed in the pleasures of the work and also enjoying that I am learning quite a lot — this combination almost never happens for me with contemporary authors. But not only is he somewhat new to this; he is also somewhat new to English. It is something to realize Bulgarian-born Penkov has only been in America fifteen years — he moved here from Sofia to study in Arkansas, of all places (he is now a professor in Texas). His first book was a collection of stories, East of the West (2012), and many of the stories can be found in A Public Space, Granta, One Story, Orion, The Sunday Times, The Best American Short Stories 2008, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. Since then he’s also won many awards and honors, from the BBC International Short Story Award 2012 and The Southern Review‘s Eudora Welty Prize to a fellowship with the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.

His eagerly awaited debut novel, Stork Mountain, came out this past spring from FSG. It has been called everything from “the Great Bulgarian Novel” by Steven G. Kellman in the Dallas Morning News to “a Bulgarian Don Quixote” by Rabih Alameddine. It is a gorgeous, ambitious, sprawling, multi-dimensional baroque tale of going back to one’s ancestral home — in this case a Bulgarian-American man looking for his grandfather, who has gone missing. The political and the mystical, the historical and the spiritual, all intertwine in unexpected ways, as coming-of-age meets love story in this stunning debut. Penkov writes his books in both English and Bulgarian — he reluctantly has become the Bulgarian translator of his own work, as he prefers to compose in English. Coming-of-age tropes, hyphenated identities, the quest to find one’s homeland, ancient myths and ancestral rituals are all preoccupations of both my own novels, so it made sense that I would love Stork Mountain, and I had the great pleasure of emailing with Penkov over the course of many months this past spring. — Porochista Khakpour

The Barnes & Noble Review: Can you talk about where this idea for Stork Mountain began?

Miroslav Penkov: I wrote Stork Mountain half a world away from Bulgaria, in the plains of Texas, where I live now. The land is flat here, the sky is enormous, and the only mountains you see are those imagined in the shapes of storm clouds gathering on the horizon. Maybe that’s why there is so much Bulgaria in this book: places and people for which my heart felt a painful longing. Maybe writing these pages was my way of erasing the distance, of returning home at least in spirit if not in body. But Stork Mountain is not a novel of nostalgia or homesickness. It is a novel of transformation, an alchemical novel whose characters embark on their own adventure, descend into darkness, pass through fire so they may be purified and born again. And like Dionysus, a god once revered there in the Stork Mountain, this novel too was twice-born: I wrote it first in English, a language I didn’t really begin to study until I was fourteen, and then again, in Bulgarian, my mother tongue.

I think I was seven when I first saw fire dancers, a tourist attraction on the Black Sea. Men and women, beautiful in their traditional costumes, dancing across live coals, barefoot, carrying in their arms large wooden icons. The mystery of their dance never left me. Why didn’t they get burned? What did it mean to enter the fire and then walk out unscathed?

It was this memory, of the women barefoot in the glowing coals, that returned to me many years later. Here was an image powerful enough to anchor my novel, to hold together its characters, places, and stories.

But there was a problem: I knew nothing of this fire dancing. How long ago did it all start? In what land? And was it still practiced today, not as a tourist attraction but in earnest? For the Persians, I learned, fire had been a sacred thing. Their Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda, had spoken to Zoroaster through flame, and it was this fire veneration that had somehow made its way to the Balkans. Then there was Eleusis, where every year for centuries on end the ancients gathered to perform the most secret rites of Greece, a rave unrivaled ever since, all in the name of Demeter and her daughter Persephone.

And then there were the maenads, the raving ones, the crazy priestesses of Dionysus who drank their doctored wine and danced madly, frantically in honor of their god; and who, in their exhilaration, tore to pieces sacrificial goats and even men foolish enough to trespass on their holy ground. The great singer Orpheus himself fell victim to these maenads, his wretched head floating down the Helikon River.

The more I read, the brighter one place burned: the Strandja Mountains, a range on the border between Bulgaria and Turkey, not far from Greece. That was where Orpheus had roamed. That was where the maenads had danced, where the cult of Dionysus had been most widespread — and where, today, the fire dancers, the nestinari, still walked in burning coals.

And this is how I found my place, a place of beauty and of sadness. Burned in countless wars, a theater of massacres and mass migrations. The Russo-Turkish Wars. The Balkan Wars of 1913. The Ottoman armies retreating left nothing but death. Ethnic cleansings of Bulgarians, Armenians, and Greeks. The more I read, the clearer I saw: the Strandja was herself a fire dancer. For centuries on end, time and again, the mountain had passed through fire, had been reduced to ash only to rise reborn.

Finally there were the storks. Each year, on their way back from Africa, 85 percent of all European white storks fly over the Strandja Mountains. Their babies hatch in Europe, get strong, and then in August the flocks fly back, once more over the Strandja. What would it be like, I wondered from my home in Texas, to look out the window and see thousands of migrating storks, trees heavy with their nests? What would it be like to cross not flat fields but an ancient mountain that holds in its bosom ancient secrets that only fire can release?

The more I read about the place, its mysteries and times, the more I ached to write. So what if I had never visited the Strandja? So what if I was far away from Bulgaria, here in Texas? I began to imagine wildly, to conjure up strange and enchanting places — a giant tree heavy with stork nests; human skulls buried in the nests; and the main characters climbing up the tree, hiding in the nest, their safe place. I imagined crossing the border into Turkey to discover old Thracian ruins up in the hills; I imagined a place where a river flows into the Black Sea. And before I knew it I’d written half the book.

Fear set in, naturally — what if I was wrong? What if all that I had thought of simply couldn’t be? Sick with dread, I flew to Bulgaria. I drove to the Strandja Mountains and watched the fire dancers walk in burning coals, and I roamed the hills and met their people. They were all there — the giant trees, the ancient ruins — as if somehow I had wished them into existence. What a beautiful feeling that was, what an eerie feeling, to see with my eyes for the first time that which my heart had always known.

BNR: Did you worry about what it might be like to bring these worlds to our world today? The anxiety of the political upon the personal, perhaps? I want to always say I am bigger than these concerns as an author, but I am far from it!

MP: There is a piece of advice I’ve learned from my father, something my great-grandfather had once told him: two things in life you should never mess with — electricity and politics. Unless you know exactly what you’re doing, they’ll both hit you with a deadly force.

I adore Chekhov and appreciate (as he called it in one letter to his brother) the “absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature” in his writing. I think politics, or too much of it, can poison the heart of a story. But at the same time, the stories I’ve wanted to write in the past fifteen years, the human beings about whom I’ve wanted to speak, have almost always been critically branded by history and politics. So that even when I’ve aimed to put character to the forefront, politics has always managed to rear its noxious head.

I didn’t want to write about the love between a Christian and a Muslim. Although, funnily enough, when the novel came out in Bulgaria a couple of months ago, one newspaper wrote exactly this as a title: Miroslav Penkov Describes What It Is Like to Be In Love with a Muslim. Instead, what I wanted to write about was the love between a young man who’s returned home after years in America and a young woman at odds with the world; a girl who struggles to escape her village, her father, and above all — herself.

But you can’t treat these characters as real human beings unless you position them accurately in the context of time and place. And so the boy becomes an immigrant scarred by the fall of Communism, hurt by a life of loneliness abroad, while the girl, hurt by that same Communist regime, is suddenly the victim of a zealous father, of a backward and superstitious culture, of the extreme application of her Muslim faith.

BNR: Can you talk about the differences between your audience abroad in Europe versus here in America?

MP: Even though my story collection East of the West was published in a dozen European countries, I have very little understanding of what my European audience is like. I simply don’t know Western Europe, because I grew up in the days of visas and austere borders and never got the chance to travel. And now that Bulgaria is part of the European Union and travel is unimpeded, it’s the lack of free time that proves the biggest obstacle. But I do think about the difference between my readers in Bulgaria and those everywhere else. Writing simultaneously in two languages — English and Bulgarian — has always put me in a difficult spot. Who is Stork Mountain really meant for? Western readers who are not intimately familiar with Bulgarian culture and history and for whom certain historical and cultural elements should be streamlined and simplified? Or readers in Bulgaria who would be supremely annoyed by too much simplification and streamlining? I don’t know how to deal with this issue other than to write for one ideal, imaginary reader — someone who knows close to nothing about Bulgaria yet is not afraid to wade out deep into its history and myth; who is not easily frightened by the politics of an unaccustomed region but is curious, hungry, and excited to learn; a traveler who understands that it is the journey that matters, the winding path with a heart, and not necessarily the straight, easy line that leads us quickly to the final destination.

BNR: Sometimes I find the English language cripples me so much when I want to write about the global or even the two sides of my hyphenated identity. What do you think about writing in English? Do you think about it?

MP: The greatest treasure in my life — aside from the people I love — is my ability to read in two languages. Bulgarian affords me a natural access to all Slavic literature, English to the literature of the rest of the world. There are writers I would have never read — and I don’t mean just Shakespeare or Carver — but writers like Borges, or Kawabata, who have never been translated into Bulgarian or translated well.
As a writer, my greatest treasure in the privilege to write in two languages. Not only doesn’t English cripple me, it simultaneously liberates and keeps me in check. In Bulgarian my prose is wild and turbulent like a river, because in Bulgarian I am often intoxicated by sounds and rhythms. My English, on the other hand, because I didn’t begin to study it seriously until I was fourteen, is much sparer, much more limited. But contrary to expectation, this austerity of prose proves to be a great blessing. Writing in English forces me to strive for clarity, for elegance; it prevents me from getting too tangled in sentences at the expense of characters and story.
Of course there are individual words, material objects that don’t exist outside of our Balkan world, outside of our Balkan languages. Like nestinari¸ for example, the fire dancers of Stork Mountain. And if I were a translator I would have felt limited and oppressed, trying to find accurate English equivalents for these words. But I’m not a translator. I just happen to sing the same song in two different voices. My aim is not to translate individual words but to carry over specific states of mind and spirit. My aim is to write in such a way that regardless of language and nationality the reader will be able to feel with her heart the place, the characters, the story.

BNR: Communism and the War on Terror have been huge American obsessions of the last decade — you can argue Islam has replaced Communism as the bogeyman. Do you feel this way at all?

MP: I’m afraid this issue is too complicated to discuss in a couple hundred words. I write this now mere hours after yet another bloody terrorist attack in Turkey. Radical Islam is the scourge of our times. I can’t imagine anyone disputing this painful truth. The people who practice it are easy to fear and easy to hate. In much the same fashion, they hate and fear us with ease. And in nefarious hands such fear and hatred are easily exploited.     I believe that there is in all of us a dark, primal force that strives for divisions. It works tirelessly to pull us out of the whole, to break the world around us into pieces that it urges us to claim, possess, and control. This is my house, my car, my wife. This is my tribe, my country. To this dark force, “the other” is always terrifying, menacing, unknown. “The other” must be feared and either subjugated or destroyed. I believe fiction has the power to counteract this divisive force. I believe fiction evokes empathy, dissolves borders, tames the ego, and ultimately erases the concept of “the other.” Fiction has the power to return us, if only for a short while, to the source, to our greater human collective.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29NVfV2

A lonely teenage girl, her last summer at home before boarding school, an intriguing gang of older, louche girls in a local park. It’s northern California at the end of the 1960s, and these girls are coming of age at the edge of unspeakable violence. Written in seductive, luminous prose, Emma Cline’s haunting novel, The Girls, captures the experience of crossing between adolescence and adulthood, questioning what we’re willing to do to belong and to be seen.

The reviews continue to land, and they are all phenomenal. “Arresting,” “stunning,” “mesmerizing and sympathetic” — and that’s just a start. They continue: “An astonishing work of imagination, “remarkably atmospheric, preternaturally intelligent, and brutally feminist,” “a wise novel that’s never showy,” “a quiet, seething confession of yearning and terror.”

A few weeks ago Emma Cline and her editor, Kate Medina, executive vice president, associate publisher, executive editorial director at Random House, took the stage at Barnes & Noble on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to talk about the genesis of this remarkable novel. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. —Miwa Messer

 

Kate Medina: One of the things I found remarkable about your book, as you know, is your profound understanding of adolescent girls and of the women they become. I remember asking you when you came in to see me, “How do you know so much about girls?” How do you?

Emma Cline: Well, there’s one easy, obvious answer — that I was a girl. But then, I also have four younger sisters, which is quite a lot of adolescents to be in one house together, as I’m sure my mother would agree. So there’s five girls in my family, as well as two boys, and all five of us are very close in age. It was really one right after the other. So just five teenage girls in one house, which is like an illness in the household. You should stay away. There should be a sign over the door.

You experience something as an adolescent girl, and maybe it doesn’t imprint on you, but you see it repeated four times in quick succession, and you start to see patterns and sort of think about the way that girls and women are treated in the world.

KM: That’s one really strong draw, I think, to this novel. In the New York Times feature about you, Emma, you spoke about driving past Charles Manson’s house as a child. Would you tell us about your background and how it inspired this novel.

EC: That was a huge part of why I came to this story. I’m from California, northern California, which is still very haunted by the ’60s. They’re still sort of dealing with the leftovers of this era, which was so important. So I sort of grew up in the shadow of it. Yeah, we would drive past San Quentin, which is a prison, when I was little, when I was six or seven, and my parents would say, “That’s Charles Manson’s house.” And in the way of little kids, I really thought he lived there. I thought that’s an awfully big house, but I was also really scared of him. He was sort of my version of the Bogeyman growing up.

Then, as I got older, I read Helter Skelter. That was the first thing I read about the Manson Family. Which I think a lot of teenagers sort of find magnetically somehow; they’re just drawn to this tawdry true-crime book. I read that, and I remember being so fascinated that the women involved, the girls were really only a few years older than I was at the time when I first read it. That’s who I was interested in, in the story. I wasn’t so interested in Manson, who I think we all know quite a bit about at this time, and I don’t know that there’s much new information that has a lot of texture. But to me, the girls . . . there was some space left over for a novelist.

KM: I think that is what we’re finding many readers relate to is your understanding of the powerful longing in girls to be seen, acknowledged, and belong. One of the messages we get on Facebook a lot about this book is: What would you do to belong? I think about this aspect of the girls in your novel when I read about ISIS, young women called “brides of ISIS” who leave Canada, the United Kingdom, and other places, vulnerable to falling into that kind of attachment. I’m wondering if you’d say more about that kind of vulnerable time in a girl’s life.

EC: Yes — this book is set mostly in the ’60s, but to me there is something about the story that really could happen at any moment, and, like you’re saying, the teenage girls who sort of ran away to join ISIS — it’s not something that was only specific to 1969. I think the desire to belong and be part of something larger, and to really be seen and noticed, is such a primal desire and won’t ever really go away. I think that’s what animates a lot of the book. The cult aspect is interesting to me, but it’s a way of talking about what I’m really interested in, which is the lives of girls and that yearning, and how does the world treat that yearning — how do they take advantage of it?

I think it’s also an age when young women are testing the boundaries of the world around them. I think we teach young women that the world is dangerous for them specifically. So if you’ve been raised that way, how do you find your way in the world? Could you maybe want to seek out danger? Because that’s a way of figuring out how will the world treat you. That’s a moment where you have excitement or power over your own life in a world that often leaves you powerless.

KM: Some other reviewers have focused on the Mansonesque aspects of Russell, who is the charismatic center of the cult. And other books have been written about California’s dark side and the male leaders, with women as bit players, I think you once said. But you wanted to write about the girls. Would you say a little more about that, and why you made girls the center of the story?

EC: Yeah. Like I said, and as you’ve mentioned, we almost have this interchangeable idea of what a cult leader looks like, and a lot of them came out of northern California. Go, California! Gerald Stone, Jim Jones, Manson . . . In many ways, they are very similar. I think we’re familiar with the psychological profile of these people. I think in this book I really like that Russell is actually the side character. In a book that people might call, like, a Manson Book or a Mansonesque book, I really like the idea of sort of putting that meat to the side. It’s been funny. It’s mostly been men, but they’ve been like, Why not more about this fascinating Russell character?

But to me, yeah, I love that his orbit around these women, actually, is in many ways incidental to the plot.

KM: It’s also very interesting in this novel how Evie gradually begins to see who he really is. It’s very sophisticated and very marvelous, how you do that.

EC: I think an older reader can see right away that he’s not anything very special, but to a fourteen-year-old girl, somebody who is sort of saying the things they want to hear — but I also love that the reason Evie really gets interested in the group is because of Suzanne, an older girl, and not because of this man, that it’s really like this projection and this intense friendship that acts as the incident that sort of gets her involved.

KM: I remember wanting to read your novel fast, to find out what was going to happen, and slow, to savor the words and the writing. I guess if a writer can ever say: How did you learn to write like this? You have an MFA from Columbia. What did you learn about writing there, and how did you develop this amazing voice?

EC: I think as a reader, I’ve always been drawn to books that create their own world, and that sort of are very immersive, and you learn how to read them as you go on. So I loved the idea of this book that functions as its own visual universe almost. I was thinking of other books that I really enjoyed. I think The Virgin Suicides is one that you immediately are sort of indoctrinated almost into this writer’s tone and style. And Lorrie Moore, too. Other writers who sort of work at a heightened pitch, I think. That was important to me.

It mostly comes from reading so much and really thinking about what I enjoy as a reader. Which is also what was great about going to an MFA program. Because you’re forced to confront the fact of readers, and if you’re working alone, you can sort of project all kinds of things onto your own work that may or may not be there. But readers will tell you. So that was important to me, to respect the reading experience when I read this book.

KM: So it was workshopped?

EC: I actually never really workshopped this novel. I was mostly workshopping short stories, just because the structure of an MFA doesn’t really lend itself to workshopping novels. So really my main reader while I was writing this book was one of my four younger sisters. It turns out you can make your younger sister read twelve drafts of a book! So she was my proto-editor. And I sort of bribed her with many treats, but she read my drafts. And in many ways, she’s sort of my ideal reader, I think. So she told me when I was going in the right direction.

KM: Did your understanding of girls and women evolve or deepen as you wrote your way through this book or as you heard people talk about the book and respond to it? I guess I wondered whether the writing of the book and the publishing of the book affected the way you think about girls and women. Was there any change that you remember noticing?

EC: For me, it’s been really gratifying hearing that the book has been meaningful to people, especially young women, but also anyone who has been a young woman or knows a young woman. What I wanted to do in writing the book was, I think, present a complex portrait of girls and sort of let them be more than the one-note characterizations that I think are so prevalent in the way that we talk about teenage girls especially. I think we have very flat characterizations of them and give them so little subjectivity and agency. So writing a book with these girls at the center who are allowed to be more than victims — sometimes they are people who victimize other people. Or something terrible can happen, and they might almost like it. They have all these complex feelings, which I think is real to how girls and women experience the world.

I know for me, as a big reader, it’s rare to come across this. I remember one of the first times I really did. I don’t know if any of have you read Diary of a Teenage Girl or seen the movie, which was also great. But my heart started pounding a little faster when I was reading, because I just thought, Oh, here it is. That’s something I really wanted to do with this book, too.

KM: A lot of the messaging online in praise of the girls has to do with what’s called the “near miss” in a girl or a woman’s life, that moment when everything could go horribly wrong. Were you aware of this kind of common or universal possible connection that people would be making to this book?

EC: Yes. And I’ve definitely heard a lot more stories as the book has been out in the world. But I think it’s something that was true with most of the women I know. Just that they experienced girlhood as this very dangerous moment, and that they were sort of going right up to the edge of things all the time, that sort of way of testing boundaries, and they felt that it was almost an accident that nothing bad happened, or that nothing worse happened. I think a lot of that points to the way that we treat women and girls and the way our society is structured — that it’s such a vulnerable population.

KM: There is in the book some commentary about the stereotypes out there of women, with which you’re at odds. So Evie identifies common female stereotypes by saying, “That was part of being a girl. You were resigned to whatever feedback you get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn’t react, you were a bitch.” That encapsulates many of the sentiments about female adolescence throughout the book. Would you want to speak about that line?

EC: Sure. It’s grim to hear it repeated back, because I think it’s somewhat true that we do give girls this tiny little real estate to sort of exist in, when, of course, they are full human beings. And can you write a book that gives them back their full humanity? Yeah.

KM: One of the things that I admired about this book is that you let us see all the people of different ages in this book as real people. Particularly your portrayal of Evie’s mother and father, who really do kind of drop the ball and leave her on her own this summer, and also to Mara, her father’s girlfriend, in that you make them real people. They are not all bad or all good. They are just people. So it’s a surprise, and one of the many surprises in this book, who comes through for Evie. Tell me how you feel, for example, about Evie’s mother. I found her quite sympathetic, trying in the ’60s way to put her life together again after a divorce.

EC: It was really important to me that no one be 100 percent bad or good, because again, I don’t think that’s how the world operates. I think it’s actually what’s most frightening about something . . . you know, a crime like there is at the center of this book, is that it’s often committed by people who you can see their humanity at the same time that you can see this horror. And what does it mean to be able to see both of those things, and have you make sense of it? Or can you even make sense? The parents don’t commit any terrible crimes, but to the teenage Evie, I think she really experiences then not as monsters but as people who are just letting her down so brutally.

But that’s what’s nice about having an older narrator — you get to comment and contextualize on this almost suffocating point of view that is like a fourteen-year-old girl’s point of view. I feel like when you’re a teenager, you can’t really accept nuance or gray area. You have this real purity almost in your commitment to your ideals or the sense that the world is very black-and-white. The definition of adulthood is compromise and nuance, the gray area. That’s the realm of being an adult, unfortunately.

KM: Can you love someone who has done something terrible? How would you answer that question?

EC: I think that’s a lot of what the book is about, that Evie has had this intense relationship with Suzanne, the older girl who draws her into this group, and she is still struggling with this many decades later, to form some narrative about what it meant or who Suzanne was to her. They might be able to meet again as adults, and you might be able to get some resolution about this person who resists any kind of easy reading. But I like the idea that in this book she never gets that closure. That felt very true to life to me, that these people can come and have a huge impact on you, and maybe for the rest of your life you would be trying to come up with a story to tell yourself about what that meant.

KM: One of the things I love most about this novel is that in roughly the last half of the book, many things happen that are not actually explained. So with some of the turning points at the end of the novel, you have to kind of figure out what you think happened. How did you manage to resist telling us what happened?

EC: I think, honestly, the character doesn’t quite know, so that’s easier to sort of occupy as the writer, too — that not-knowing. But also, that’s what I’m most interested in in art and fiction especially, is these ambiguous moments. For me, I was thinking a lot about sort of moral luck with this book. One of the examples that’s most used is, like: Is somebody who drives drunk but doesn’t kill anyone as culpable as someone who drives drunk and happens to get in a car accident where someone dies? The accident of the way our lives turn out. And also, what would it mean to you if you could feel your proximity to something so terrible and sort of never know what your culpability, your moral responsibility really was in that moment? That to me seems a rich well to draw from for fiction.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29NVfof

Detective Sergeant Manon Bradshaw of Susie Steiner’s Missing, Presumed is thirty-nine years old, single, and doggedly seeking love. The last is not her defining characteristic, but it is her most unfortunate one. (“Two years of Internet dating. It’s fair to say they haven’t flown by.”) When we meet her, she is enduring dinner at a restaurant with a man “whose name might be Brian but equally be Keith.” By any name he is a bore and a prig, his outstanding features being his interest in the details of his own job and his extreme punctiliousness in dividing the bill: He did not, he points out, have any wine. To those of us who are gobblers of British crime novels, Manon is a familiar type, built along the lines of Ian Rankin‘s Siobhan Clarke and Kate Atkinson‘s Tracy Waterhouse: bad diet, regrettable clothes, stubborn, perceptive, clear-headed, and hardnosed with a well-concealed heart. More particularly, Manon is a member of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, and the case that brings her to our notice, in this the first volume of what is projected to be a series, is that of a missing woman.

Returning one Sunday night to the little worker’s cottage he shares with his girlfriend, Edith Hind, Will Carter finds the door open and the lights on. Edith’s phone, keys, and car are there, and also some spatters of blood — but no Edith. He calls the police, and matters quickly become of the highest priority when it turns out that the missing woman, a graduate student at Cambridge University, is the daughter of Sir Ian Hind and his wife, Miriam. Sir Ian is a surgeon, among whose patients are members of the royal family. Beyond that, he is great friends with the home secretary and not at all reluctant to throw his weight around. “From now on,” Manon’s superior officer tells her sardonically, “we treat Sir Bufton Tufton downstairs with the utterly slavish deference he so richly deserves.”

As the investigation proceeds, a picture of Edith begins to emerge, and the more we learn about her, the more tiresome she strikes us as being. A harsh critic of the modern world, a would-be savior of the planet, and an advocate of “living truthfully,” she is supported by her parents with a handsome monthly allowance. She refuses to have a bank account, declaring that “someone has to break with the status quo,” and is in favor of banning cars — though she has an electric one herself. In the course of questioning Edith’s friends and acquaintances, the police learn that she has treated a close friend, Helena, with sarcastic contempt, then initiated a sexual relationship with her, leaving the other woman confused, ashamed, and yearning. Not content with that, she boasted of the affair. Soon enough, the media learn of the matter, reporting it with lurid extravagance. The consequence is disastrous.

Additional strands weave their way in: A notorious sexual predator seems to have had some sort of contact with Edith and, more dramatically, the drowned body of a young man, a petty criminal, is discovered in the nearby River Ouse. Is there a connection? Does the dead man’s younger brother, whom he looked after, hold a clue? And what will become of this child now that his brother is gone?

The story is told from three main points of view, with glimpses from a couple of others. Manon’s dominates, followed by that of Edith’s mother, Miriam, a trained physician who has wound up giving over much of her life to being a wife and a mother to two children. We also see matters as Detective Constable Davy Walker sees them. He is a cheerful, compassionate young man who works with troubled children in his off hours. His girlfriend, Chloe, on the other hand, is a triumph of passive aggression, a killjoy and a source of exquisitely bleak comedy.

The novel’s plot is serviceable, possessing an appropriate roster of possible culprits and a wide array of laptops, cell phones, and CCTVs through which to rummage; still, the book’s real strength lies in its characters: their personalities, their emotions, and their little ways. “Sir Bufton Tufton” is unable to disguise his contempt for ordinary people; Miriam is shown perceptively in both her grief and her ambivalence about her life’s trajectory; Helena’s wretchedness over incidents she herself didn’t understand is palpable, as is her agony over being exposed publicly. Kind, sweet Davy is a joy, and his god-awful girlfriend is a pearl beyond price. Finally, Manon is a fully developed, which is to say credibly flawed, human being, especially in her unregulated feelings toward intimacy. This is a most promising start to what, I hope, will be a substantial series.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29NPBXm