Category: Book Review

The Paper Man by Billy O’Callaghan

Image of The Paper Man

Author(s): 

Billy O’Callaghan

Release Date: 

May 2, 2023

Publisher/Imprint: 

Godine

Pages: 

248

Buy on Amazon

Reviewed by: 

Claire Fullerton

“The Paper Man is a haunting story gorgeously crafted with subtle themes of identity, nationalism, dislocation, lost love, and the price of fame.”

Billy O’Callaghan’s The Paper Man slowly unveils a love story affected by pivotal world events. It weaves a compelling story in two time frames brought together from one man’s search for identity that spans two countries and leaves an impact on multiple generations. The story enthralls on many levels. It’s a deeply human one that takes its inspiration from the life of a celebrated historical figure who suffered the ramifications of the Holocaust.

It is 1980s Cork, Ireland, and 41-year-old Jack Shine’s life is now changed. In the dark, just before sleep, he whispers to his wife as much as to himself, “You think you know yourself. You fill yourself up with what you can, you grab what’s going and hold on. And then something like this happens, and suddenly you’re empty all over again.”

The emptiness Jack refers to concerns the death of his mother when he was age ten. What he knows of himself is that he is well-loved by the relatives who raised him, and that his mother, Rebekah, “had arrived here from Vienna, as vibrant and cosmopolitan a city as any in Europe . . . she’d originally been country born and bred and had kept her preference for silences and slower ways.” Jack understands that his young, Jewish mother had fled Vienna on the cusp of WWII to be out of harm’s way and found safe haven in Cork, with the family of her father’s brother. But because of his age when she died, Jack knows little of Rebekah’s backstory, including the identity of his father. His relatives are equally unaware of the details that led to Jack’s birth, having asked no questions when Rebekah arrived in Cork pregnant  and unable to speak the language.   

Local stevedore Jack lives down the street with his wife and daughter from the house in which he was raised. Now that his original family home is on the market, he clears out its contents and finds “a twine-bound grey cardboard shoebox . . . bearded in dust and probably decades hidden,” in which a series of faded newspaper clippings, love letters, and photographs are neatly preserved. The letters are written in German and addressed to his mother. “The one-sided nature of the letters, especially when considered in total, only raises further questions and deepens the sense of mystery.” What Jack recalls of his mother is that “she is timid, silent to a fault, and easily cowed, the kind to hold herself to smallness in any room.” Although he fears what the shoebox might reveal, something within him must know. Because his nearby father-in-law speaks fluent German, Jack dares to solicit his involvement. And so begins Jack’s search for identity—his father’s, and by extension, his own.

It is the dawn of WWII in 1938 Vienna, and the whole of the region puts their sense of pending doom aside in favor of the last-gasping breath of patriotism, as the Austrian and German soccer teams face off, on the last day the Austrian flag flies in front of 60,000 exuberant fans. The symbolic significance of the match cannot be overstated, when onto the playing field strolls Matthias Sindelar, the Austrian team player everyone has come to see.

Matthias Sindelar is larger than life. Regaled as the finest living soccer player, his moniker, the Paper Man, is aptly given. “When he runs, even at thirty-five, it is like watching a great dancer, that same godly elegance of power, grace, and musicality . . . he glides and slaloms among them . . . every touch, pass and dribble becomes a small glory in and of itself, an exhibition in the purest sense.” An object of Austrian pride, “The press loved him because in everything he did he was pure story. Mozart with a football.”

With all eyes upon him at the last match before the war, Sindelar is unable to resist the opportunity to publicly snub his opponents, and consequently draws the long gaze of the Gestapo when he performs a mocking gesture before a riveted crowd that feels like “a colosseum moment.”

Sindelar, reputably a ladies’ man, has his heart captured by young and innocent Rebekah from the village of Kaumberg. “The mismatch was instantly apparent: at the time of their initial encounter she had only just turned nineteen and was every bit the country innocent . . . The thirteen-year age difference felt like a hurdle impossible to overcome.” As their relationship evolves into something profound, so does tension over Germany’s occupation of Austria, setting the stage for the pair to become star-crossed lovers.

O’Callaghan’s sense of place in The Paper Man’s two time frames is cinematic. The historical accuracy of streets, buildings, and cafés in 1938 Vienna is vivid, and the humble neighborhoods of working-class, 1980s Cork are alive all the way to the waterfront docks.

The author’s knowledge of soccer’s breakneck speed dynamic is displayed with breathtaking minutiae, striking a fine balance between those cheering from the stands and those playing on the field. O’Callaghan’s use of language is the life force of the story. His long sentences are sonorous and poetic; no detail is left unattended in his masterfully fluid prose.

The Paper Man is a haunting story gorgeously crafted with subtle themes of identity, nationalism, dislocation, lost love, and the price of fame. The story informs and intrigues the most discerning reader of literary and historical fiction, and will linger long after its final page.

Claire Fullerton’s most recent novels are Little Tea and multiple award winner, Mourning Dove. Honors include the Independent Book Publishers Book Award Silver Medal for Regional Fiction, the Reader’s Favorite for Southern Fiction Bronze Medal and various other literary awards.

Billy O’Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and is the author of four short story collections: In Exile (2008, Mercier Press), In Too Deep (2009, Mercier Press), The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind (2013, New Island Books, winner of a 2013 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award and selected as Cork’s One City, One Book for 2017), and The Boatman (2020, Jonathan Cape and Harper (U.S.A.)), as well as the novels The Dead House (2017, Brandon/O’Brien Press and 2018, Arcade/Skyhorse (USA)), My Coney Island Baby, (2019, Jonathan Cape and Harper (U.S.A.)) and Life Sentences (2021, Jonathan Cape and Godine (U.S.A.)).

His latest novel, The Paper Man, was recently published by Jonathan Cape and Godine in May 2023. Read more about it on the Books page.

Billy is the winner of a Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award for the short story, and twice a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Bursary Award for Literature. Among numerous other honours, his story, The Boatman, was a finalist for the 2016 Costa Short Story Award, and more than a hundred of his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in literary journals and magazines around the world, including: Absinthe: New European Writing, Agni, the Bellevue Literary Review, the Chattahoochee Review, Confrontation, the Fiddlehead, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Kenyon Review, the Kyoto Journal, the London Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, Salamander, and the Saturday Evening Post.

The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Callahan Henry

The world building elements in Patti Callahan Henry’s The Secret Book of Flora Lea are as varied and finely wrought as brush strokes on canvas. In the enchanting story’s two timeframes, the reader is taken into a quaint hamlet outside Oxford; pastoral fields beside the river Thames; a stone cottage with flourishing gardens; the fairy tale setting of Whisperwood; an antiquated bookstore in London’s town center; and, at the heart of the unfolding mystery, a secret between sisters evacuated from WWII London that haunts Hazel Linden well into 1960.

Excited to be taking an upwardly mobile position at Sotheby’s, on her last day of employment at Hogan’s Rare Book Shoppe in Bloomsbury, 25-year-old Hazel receives a shocking delivery from America of a recently published book titled, Whisperwood that dredges up the central wound of her past. The associated guilt Hazel harbors is never far from mind. “The dread. The panic. The jealousy of other people having small children at their side . . . Some days, she’d turn to that loss and acknowledge it, and sometimes, for blessed hours, she would forget, but then the shadow would fall long and fast onto her soul and she’d remember this: She lost her sister.”

Examining the book in hand, Hazel’s thoughts turn to 1940s London and “Operation Pied Piper, “a nursery rhyme name for a horror of an idea” that swept 14-year-old Hazel and her five-year-old sister, Flora, to the countryside during an uncelebrated part of England’s history that saw the children of WWII’s London relocated from harm’s way. “Now in the backroom of the small Rare Book Shoppe, the past overcame her. She’d been searching for her sister for twenty years now, ever since she’d disappeared when she was six years old from the hamlet of Binsey, and now Hazel had a clue, something to grasp on to and she was not letting go.”

Hazel’s devotion to discovering the truth behind the disappearance of her sister drives the story, and at its center is a 1940s fairy tale Hazel made up, intending to distract young Flora from the war-torn reality around them. The story grows in magical increments and begins each time, “Not very long ago and not very far away, there was and still is an invisible place right here with us. And if you are born knowing, you will find your way through the woodlands to the simmering doors that lead to the land made just and exactly for you.” The details of the imagined kingdom Hazel named Whisperwood were kept secret between the displaced sisters. When the book with that title falls into Hazel’s hands, so begins an expertly crafted suspenseful mystery.

The two timeframes in The Secret Book of Flora Lea create high stakes motivation as Hazel endeavors to discover what happened to Flora, while securing her own future. By 1960, Hazel has made a neat life for herself, despite her family’s unhealed backstory. Engaged to a young man from a prominent family and on course as a purveyor of rare books, when the past comes to haunt, questions of life’s priorities come to the fore, tipping the scale to the importance of family.

The supporting characters oscillate with fluid strategy throughout the story, as Hazel Linden, against all odds, refuses to accept the final judgement on her sister’s disappearance. Callahan Henry keeps the reader in character invested suspense. When all characters are brought into surprising alignment, Hazel asks herself, “Is this where hope met despair? Where the past rushed to the present? Where joy replaced the agony of the lost?”

Patti Callahan Henry delivers, yet again, an historically layered, dreamy tale that keeps the anglophile fires burning, on the heels of her acclaimed 2021 release, Once Upon a Wardrobe. Her descriptive detail is cinematic. Fourteen-year-old Hazel Linden, newly re-homed at the Aberdeen’s countryside cottage, gazes out the kitchen window in the hamlet of Binsey: “What a place this was, Hazel thought. All the wide green space to run; the rippling of the sky that touched the horizon of trees unobstructed by a cathedral or tall building. It was as if by taking a simple train ride the world had unfolded, presenting itself in long stretches of rolling hills and heather fields.”

A charming story that weaves fairy tale, mystery, and historical importance with a good dose of romance, The Secret Book of Flora Lea will appeal to all ages, as the author unfurls a fantastic story about “an invisible place right here with us.”

Salvage This World by Michael Farris Smith

As it appears in the New York Journal of Books

Against the kinetic backdrop of a hurricane brewing and a young mother on the run from Louisiana, author Michael Farris Smith cinematically opens his Southern noir novel, Salvage This World, with a literary split screen depicting a phone call Jessie never wanted to make and Wade never wanted to answer. The desperate Jessie is in flight for her life, and the recovering alcoholic Wade never knew how to act like her father.   

When Jessie, now in her early twenties, arrives with her young son in a stolen car at her estranged father’s ramshackle house in Pike County, Mississippi, Wade stands on his porch, lights a cigarette, and thinks, “She didn’t even tell you. And he ain’t even a baby anymore. She had a baby and didn’t tell you and now the baby is a boy, and she didn’t even tell you.”  

Farris Smith sets the stage for characters wanting to connect despite the mutual, deep-seated resentment at the heart of their estrangement, when Wade dares to ask, “Where is Holt?” and Jessie says, “I can’t believe you said his name.”

Holt is the father of Jessie’s son, and his life has gone from bad to worse. A dozen years older than Jessie, the pair met at the local dairy bar, and although Jessie never asks, she knows the scars on the back of Holt’s neck chart his unlucky childhood.  

The current trouble at the center of the story begins with Holt nursing a hangover prior to meeting Jessie. “Three years before, Holt had awakened with his face in the dirt, out behind a cinderblock bar on the outskirts of St. Francisville.” When he sees a group erecting a revival tent in a nearby field, he is intrigued. It is “as if he were not only still drunk but also trapped in a lucid dream of beckoning.”

The woman spearheading the revival is named Elser. Possessed of otherworldly charisma, she drives a hearse and leads the travelling congregation of The Temple of Pain and Glory by preaching us-versus-them sermons for monetary donation throughout an impoverished South so inhospitable it’s now dwindling in population. “No matter the field or parking lot or beaten up town the Temple of Pain and Glory raised its banner.”

As for her lemming-like parishioners, Elser “beat them with the stick of distrust and they cheered their own suffering.” The cynical Holt observes Elser from the back of the tent and knows, “She had them. The small, wrinkled, lightweight monster of a woman had them.”

In it but not of it, for lack of a better place to go, Holt intuits sinister dealings behind the scenes of the Temple of Pain and Glory, and when he witnesses the handoff of a mysterious key between Elser and a dubious character, events take a turn for the worse as curiosity leads Holt to break into Elser’s lodgings to steal them, resulting in his becoming a hunted man, and sweeping Jessie into a life-threatening story.  

It is dark and disturbing dealings against a do-or-die background, and Michael Farris Smith keeps the tension off-kilter while unravelling the broken character’s surprising cause-and-effect connections. Weaving theft, murder, and kidnapping all having to do with the key, a menacing sky is sure to unleash a hurricane any minute.  

The author’s gift for oblique dialogue is scene stealing. The characters speak cryptically in regional dialect telling of their baggage and downtrodden station, and the bleak settings are commensurate with the tenor of the story, when Wade, unwittingly drawn into Holt’s drama, embarks on a high-stakes  mission in the dead of night to parts unknown. It is “A dense and untamed landscape drenched in darkness and rain. Wade drove along narrowed roads and unmarked roads and roads covered in runnels of muddy water and he went down gravel roads and slick roads that ran along overgrown fields and disappeared into thick forests and he searched and searched to find the crossing that would seem familiar to him.”   

Farris Smith is in top form at the layered story’s breathtaking climax, masterfully guiding disparate variables from a slow burn to an incendiary ending with suspenseful detail, multi-sensory pacing, and a future open to interpretation.

Salvage This World is specifically set yet transcends regional fiction. It’s a masterly drawn, tightly controlled story about the lengths one will go to safeguard their own.   

Michael Farris Smith at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

Variety is the Spice of Life by Sally Cronin

I have long been a fan of Sally Cronin’s writing, so it was with great enthusiasm that I read her November 2022 release, Variety is the Spice of Life, whose title is delightfully appropriate for the assembly of poetry and prose that covers a range of topics.

In Ms. Cronin’s author introduction, she states the essence of her book’s intention, “In this latest collection of poetry and short stories I have attempted to capture the beauty and raw power of nature, and the resilience of humans as they face a modern world of change and disruption.” The author does that and more, and the entirety of this book is a breath of fresh air replete with creative nuance.

The book begins with a series of soul-stirring poems—each short, pithy, and inspirational enough to serve as its own existential meditation. In Expeditions we are encouraged to “ignore those who say it’s foolish to try to reach for the stars,” and in Bear Witness, we are asked to consider the plight of the immigrant, “do not look away, bear witness to tragedy, give deepest respect…do not become complacent.” In Lullaby, Ms. Cronin sings the praises of women, by musing on the different voices used to sooth an infant, “but words that mothers sing to babies all around the world loving.”  

#17 in Variety is the Spice of Life reads as a first-person essay, in which the author shares her experience with DNA Ancestral testing. Written in unembellished prose, it’s a beautiful, confessional piece that fittingly precedes the Choka, Origins, in which the author muses on her own genetic line that ends with  powerful impact. In another treatise on family, Face in the Mirror, culminates in the realization, “I’ve morphed into my mother.”

Rounding out the poems is a series titled, A Snapshot from My Garden, and those of us who have followed the author for years know well of the celebrated setting. Ireland is captured in The Colour of Life, and in The Robin—Size Doesn’t Matter, a red robin is declared “the garden’s emperor.” A life span is metaphorically depicted in Blossom, and the series closes with an individual look at bees, butterflies, doves, and cats. 

Ms. Cronin brings her unique voice to eight delightful short stories. Her craft is economic and straight forward, striking an overall tone in a momentum pairing bright language with broad strokes. Her small-town settings are atmospheric and depict character as place, her subjects are humanistic and appeal to animal lovers, nature lovers, and those who applaud a well-deserved sense of cosmic comeuppance.  

In The Neighborhood Watch, a cat has the last word. In The Green Hill an elderly couple’s day out in a windswept, coastal region has a sense of the uncanny, and in On the Run, a frozen foods employee living under an assumed identity sees her turbulent past brought to justice.

Variety is the Spice of Life by Sally Cronin is a well-balanced, uplifting collection of poetry and prose both poignant and entertaining. It’s a thoughtful and satisfying book that casts a light on the best of human nature.

Variety is the Spice of Life is available on Kindle!

The Author, Sally Cronin

Sally Cronin is the author of sixteen books including her memoir Size Matters: Especially when you weigh 330lb first published in 2001. This has been followed by another fifteen books both fiction and non-fiction including multi-genre collections of short stories and poetry.

As an author she understands how important it is to have support in marketing books and offers a number of FREE promotional opportunities on her blog and across her social media. The Smorgasbord Bookshelf My blog is https://smorgasbordinvitation.wordpress.com

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63362080-variety-is-the-spice-of-life?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=I4AxOvUnDe&rank=1

Book Review: Reef Road by Deborah Goodrich Royce

My Book Review, as it appears in the New York Journal of Books:

Author Deborah Goodrich Royce’s psychological thriller Reef Road hits the high notes of suspense with breathtaking sleight of hand, building as it unfolds in alternating chapters written in two tenses like puzzle pieces that keep the reader on their toes.

The story is one-part true crime detective novel that reads like creative nonfiction concerning a decades’ old unsolved murder, and one-part literary thriller involving a woman enmeshed in a self-created chain of events now careening out of hand. Reef Road seamlessly weaves two storylines while suspensefully delaying their linkage, oscillating with a slow burn between what is perceived at face value and what really happened.

The story opens in media res, under the prologue’s heading The Wife. It is May 2020, in the advent of Covid-19’s lockdown, when two boys find a disembodied hand washed up on Palm Beach, Florida’s sand. When the boys alert the authorities, so begins Reef Road’s harrowing backstory that leads to that severed hand.

An unspecified voice under the heading A Writer’s Thoughts narrates intermittingly throughout Reef Road. The writer researches the 1948 Pittsburg death of 12-year-old Noelle Huber, whose murder to date remains unsolved. Now living abjectly alone in Palm Beach with an aged dog named Cordie, the decidedly peculiar writer has personal interest in the case and reports, “I grew up under the shadow of a dead girl—a girl I had never met, whose family had not heard of me, a family I would not know if I passed them on the street, nor would they, in turn, know me.” The weight of the dead girl’s shadow is due to the writer’s neurotic mother, once a close, childhood friend of Noelle Huber’s, who remained indelibly scarred by her murder in such a way that made her exceedingly nervous and cast a pall on the writer’s childhood.

Investigating decades’ old evidence, the writer’s feelings are complicated by residual resentment associated with the case. In speaking of the damage incurred from growing up with her paranoid mother in a small town on the outskirts of Pittsburg, the writer says, “My mother’s imprint of her friend’s murder was that of the twelve-year-old child she’d been at the time. A large part of her was frozen in 1948.”

In addressing what it was like to grow up with a damaged mother, the writer says, “I didn’t want to have that kind of mother. I did not want to be that kid. I did not want to come from the family I did, with some string attaching us all to a dead girl.” In explaining what clearly becomes an unhealthy obsession with Noelle Huber’s murder, the writer says, “A single act of violence does not end. Noelle Grace Huber was murdered seventy-two years ago this year, but, for me—for others like me—it never ends.”

Linda Alonzo does not speak Spanish. Married to a prosperous Argentinian named Miguel Alonzo, she is the mother of two young children who grew up in Pittsburgh and now lives in the tony section of Palm Beach’s Reef Road. The marriage is difficult, and with regard to Miguel, “Linda increasingly chafed under the yoke of his control.” Yet the perks of the marriage outweigh the obvious. “Linda and Miguel were walking the edge, all right. The edge of what, precisely, she did not know.”

Diego Alonzo is presumed dead. The elder brother of Miguel, his last known whereabouts was in the mountains of Bolivia decades prior, after he fled another fight with his mother, before all lines of communication went dead. In the dark of night, the mysterious Diego manifests at the Alonzo’s Reef Road front door, and ushers in familial upheaval complicated by the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic, making his visit protracted, adding chaos to Linda and Miguel’s fragile marriage, and leading to an inciting incident in the tumultuous story: “At eleven a.m. on a Sunday morning, Linda picked up the phone to call the police and report her family missing. Why she had not called the cops, the day it had actually happened was an act of omission that would come back to haunt her.”  

The exciting, page-turning intelligence of Reef Road cannot be overstated. The clever story will please lovers of mystery, crime, and thriller genres. Author Deborah Goodrich Royce handles the balance of Reef Road’s off-kilter story with a magnificent, firm grip. The novel is rife with uncanny connections and flawed main characters with hidden agendas. It’s tense with secondary characters, whose impacts are stunning, as events ricochet in a series of strange chain-reactions sprung from perfectly timed twists you’ll never see coming.  

Meet the Author: Deborah Goodrich Royce

Deborah Goodrich Royce’s literary thrillers examine puzzles of identity. Finding Mrs. Ford and Ruby Falls will be joined by Reef Road in January 2023.

Deborah began her career as an actress, starring as Silver Kane, sister of the legendary Erica Kane (played by Susan Lucci) on the ABC soap, All My Children. She went on to star in feature films such as April Fool’s Day and Just One of the Guys, TV movies such as Return to Peyton Place and The Deliberate Stranger, and series such as Beverly Hills 90210 and 21 Jump Street.

After the birth of her daughters, she moved with her family to Paris and worked as a reader for le Studio Canal Plus. In the 1990’s, Deborah was the story editor at Miramax Films in New York. There, she oversaw readers, manuscript acquisitions, and script development, editing such notable screenplays as Emma by Doug McGrath, and early versions of Chicago and A Wrinkle in Time.

With writing partner, Mitch Giannunzio, Deborah won a grant from the Massachusetts Arts Council in 2002 to develop and workshop their original screenplay, Susan Taft Has Run Amok.

With her husband, noted small-cap investor, Chuck Royce, Deborah restored the 1939 Avon Theatre in Stamford, CT. Under her leadership, the Avon hosts an ongoing series of film luminaries, most recently, Mira Nair, Richard Gere and Chloe Sevigny. The late Gene Wilder, a longstanding advisory board member of the Avon, was an early advocate for Deborah’s writing.

Deborah and Chuck have restored several hotels (Ocean House, Deer Mountain Inn, Weekapaug Inn, and The Margin Street Inn), a bookstore (The Savoy in Westerly, RI), and numerous other Main Street buildings in Westerly, RI and Tannersville, NY.

Deborah serves on the governing boards of the New York Botanical Garden, the Greenwich Historical Society, and the PRASAD Project and the advisory boards of the American Film Institute, the Greenwich International Film Festival, the Preservation Society of Newport County, and the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach. She is a former trustee of the YWCA of Greenwich and the Garden Conservancy.

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Foster by Claire Keegan

In emotionally evocative, simplistic language, author Claire Keegan tells the story of a young girl sent to live with rural Irish relatives, while her over-burdened mother is due to have yet another baby. First-time experiences and awkward adjustments give the tentative girl her first taste of self-worth and belonging to a childless couple now aching to share their heart. A story profound in tacit nuance and cultural identity, the poignant ending resonates with an appropriateness both heart-rending and satisfying.

      Claire Keegan is an Irish writer known for her award-winning short stories. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta, and The Paris Review; and translated into 20 languages.

An international bestseller and one of The Times’ “Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century,” Claire Keegan’s piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US

Book Review: The Presence of Absence by Simon Van Booy

The Presence of Absence

Image of The Presence of Absence

Author: Simon Van Booy

Buy on Amazon

Reviewed by: 

Claire Fullerton for The New York Journal of Books

Max Little is dying and wants to leave behind something of his life. A young writer of novels, novellas, and short stories, Max grew up in Wales, is of Pakistani descent, and now reclines in a New York hospital bed, in full acceptance of his terminal illness.

Not wanting to beg the reader’s pity, Max does what he does best by writing, and begins his straightforward narrative by marveling at the magic between reader and writer: “You do realize that by turning the page you’ve decided to follow a complete stranger down a possibly meaningless path?” he says. “Stories lead us behind the curtain of somebody else’s life into the deepest chambers of our own.” Max considers that by the time the reader puts eyes to his words, he, himself, might be absent. “None of that matters,” he assures, “because our lives are braided here and now by this sentence.” Seemingly delighted to embellish his point, Max continues, “For instance, I’m writing this in the present, and you’re reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between us. I might even be dead. Yet here I am.”

In Simon Van Booy’s extraordinary novel, The Presence of Absence, each well-wrought sentence builds upon the next, taking us deeper into Max Little’s life with staggering lucidity. The first part of the story is constructed in descending numerical chapters that decline with a sense of fatalism as the narrator reconstructs his life’s highpoints interspersed with uncanny, existential observations on the business of life, death, and dying. Max confesses his mind’s innerworkings with adroit ease. “Do people ever walk around their homes, wondering which room they will die in? Whether it will be a Wednesday night or Saturday morning at the table with toast and coffee?”  And “What would happen to things like knives and forks once I was gone. Would my wife keep them?”

At the center of Max Little’s concern is his wife, Hadley, and the reader is taken to their first meeting even as Max shares his ruminations on how to best tell Hadley he is dying. Pondering his plight alone on a beach, he arrives at a profound spiritual truth, when he comes to consider himself in the third person. Max posits, “When you nurture the ability to witness your life in the third person, in extremis, or through prayer or meditation, there is an unavoidable shift in consciousness as you realize that who you are is not simply how you feel—but a presence beyond desire of any sort.”

Jeremy Abrams’s mother is dying. He comes into Max’s life through the coincidence of their shared New York therapist. The men bond over the similarities in their life circumstances, and as their friendship grows, it is Jeremy who suggests that Max begin keeping the journal the reader now holds in their hands. Max writes, “You might wonder what dying people look forward to. Being visited, yes, but also being left alone—though that takes a lot of practice, managing thoughts . . . I also look forward to reassuring people it’s okay this is happening.”

In The Presence of Absence, Part Two is theatrically introduced as a quick, black scene change. The section brilliantly holds the subheading, Sotto Voce. The third person story moves forward eight years in time, and fittingly alternates between breathtaking poetry, poignant one-liners, and what miraculously transpires from the connections formed in Max Little’s absence. An insight comes at the hands of one such connection, who stands at a sink washing cups in a basin and thinks, “Like the cups draining on a tea towel, absence has a practical value in how it shapes presence.”

A mind-bending, affecting story that breaks the heart open with startling clarity, this book makes the reader want to take pen in hand to underline The Presence of Absences’ passages. That author Simon Van Booy has taken a universal subject most prefer to shy away from and creatively crafted an accessible work of high art is an unparalleled literary feat. The deft use of language in this tour de force fulfills its own mission when Van Booy summarizes, “Language is a map leading to a place not on the map.”   

Simon Van Booy

Simon Van Booy is the award-winning and best-selling author of nine books of fiction, and three anthologies of philosophy.

He has written for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the New York Post, NPR, Poets & Writers, and the BBC. His books have been translated into many languages and optioned for film. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter. In 2013, he founded Writers for Children, a project which helps young people build confidence in their storytelling abilities through annual awards.

Beasts Of The Earth by James Wade

Beasts of the Earth

Image of Beasts of the Earth

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Reviewed by: 

Claire Fullerton for The New York Journal of Books

We know from the start LeBlanc is wounded, that his limping spirit is tantamount to the spare, prison-like furnishings of the low-ceilinged duplex he’s rented on the shanty side of town for the past 20 years, that his economic speech has little to do with still waters running deep, that it’s born of a wariness from what he’s hiding.

It is the economic downturn of 1987 in Coral County, Texas, where thirty-something Harlan LeBlanc works alongside the small crew of Carter Hills High School’s Grounds and Maintenance Department, and partakes of a cursory friendship with a troubled, young co-worker named Gene Thomas. A man of habit gripping to a rote, daily schedule, LeBlanc tends the high school’s football field with each step carefully taken, in a manner telling of his mind frame. “LeBlanc reveled in such undertakings—the opportunity to create boundaries, to ensure the proper area for the rules to be applied. There was an element of control, an upholding of justice, that brought peace

to his mind.”  

It is 1965 in the bayou of Assumption Parrish, Louisiana, and 13-year-old Michael Fischer’s hardscrabble world grows harder when his regionally shunned, depraved criminal father is released from prison. “A boy should be happy when his father returns, but Michael was not happy. He had memories of Munday—memories distorted by time and hearsay—and though there existed still a longing for the comfort and protection of a father, dread guided the boy.” Used to being the man of the house for his morbidly obese mother and younger sister, Michael is in fear when his hard-drinking father is home, and only breathes easy when he habitually disappears.

After home circumstances take an unspeakable, dark turn at the hands of his father, Michael flees to the woods, where he’s met with more danger still, until he’s found by a dying recluse of a poet named Remus, who takes the injured Michael to his cabin, and begins the long road to repairing the traumatized, now displaced, youth.

Over time, the strangers warm to an alliance, and Michael “played at having a father, and Remus played at being one. But the past is not a thing to sit still, and there are no new beginnings. The world itself was begun only once. And since that beginning its every rotation has depended on the one before—each circumstance born from the last.”

Cassie Harper has broken Gene Thomas’s heart. A student at Carter Hills High, there is

more to her than meets the eye. When Cassie is found murdered on school grounds, it rocks the entire community. When circumstantial evidence comes to include Gene Thomas, it strikes LeBlanc too close to home, casting aspersions on his character, and giving rise to his secret, haunted past.  

Author James Wade treads a tight wire between Beasts of the Earth’s dual storylines. He deftly keeps the reader guessing about common ground throughout the tumult of the three-part story. The tone is shadowy and off-kilter, with elements of gothic-tinged realism vested upon an innocent heart, and a mind in peril of becoming unhinged.

There is much to keep the reader invested. Wade’s pitch-perfect, personality-driven dialogue sings in the voice of life, and his ability to meld existential thought, situational metaphor, and cinematic setting is a full-bodied experience: As Harlan LeBlanc sets out to right a wrong from the past, “He walked along the river in the morning light and watched it widen and grow as it approached Port Neches and then on to the Gulf of Mexico, and he wondered if the river might hold itself or some piece of itself out there in all that ocean—might cling at some molecular level to whatever made it a river in the first place, salt or no salt. But he knew the answer and knew the difficulty in fighting back against an ever-growing tide.”

Beasts of the Earth satisfies the discerning reader. Its balanced, oscillating chapters are played out in riveting complete scenes that take you deeper into the gritty backstory of Harlan LeBlanc, a man you care about, and somehow understand from what he’s not saying, while the town around him holds him in suspicion and his moral compass covertly guides him to truth and justice sought at a personal cost.

A soul-deep exploration of a wounded man in crisis, James Wade’s Beasts of the Earth follows his two widely acclaimed novels, All Things Left Wild, and River, Sing Out, and secures his position as an author of extraordinary merit.  

Author James Wade

James Wade lives and writes in the Texas Hill Country with his wife and daughter. He is the author of River, Sing Out and All Things Left Wild, a winner of the prestigious MPIBA Reading the West Award for Debut Fiction, and a recipient of the Spur Award for Best Historical Novel from the Western Writers of America. His third novel, Beasts of the Earth, is now available from Blackstone Publishing.

Book Review: A Place to Land by Lauren Denton

A Place to Land

Image of A Place to Land

Author: Lauren K. Denton

Release Date: October 4, 2022

Publisher/Imprint: Harper Muse

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Reviewed by: 

Claire Fullerton

“Lauren Denton unfurls a mystery by reconciling a buried past with a modern-day story set in a town with vibrant characters brimming with Southern charm.”

A delightful Southern story extolling the deep bond of sisters, Lauren Denton’s A Place to Land has a heartwarming tone as it unravels a 40-year-old mystery coming back to haunt a cast of small-town characters whose lives are entwined in Sugar Bend, Alabama, which sits on Little River, with a population of under 2,000 just a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico.

Violet and Trudy Figg have an extremely close relationship. Now both in their sixties, their bond comes from “more than just being sisters, more than sharing a home and parents and a fondness for chocolate pudding.” From elder sister Violet’s point of view, “It was a single request from their fragile, damaged mother that linked them with something thicker than blood.” “With a father who was often out on the road in his eighteen-wheeler, and a mother who spent most of her energy dodging blows . . . Violet had accepted her role of Trudy’s caretaker long ago.”  

In their youth, the sisters were complimentary opposites. Trudy enjoyed a wide reputation as a popular beauty pageant queen, while Violet was the quiet, introspective sort who spent most of her time outdoors.

The sisters now keep a steady schedule. “Trudy and Violet both navigated life the best way they knew how—for Trudy, it was working with her materials and setting the pieces just right, while for Violet it was through the birds . . . helping them on their way.”

Trudy creates eclectic visual art with the likes of shells, feathers, and driftwood, while Violet works as a surveyor for the Coastal Alabama Audubon Society. Together, the sisters own and operate Two Sisters Art and Hardware Goods in downtown Sugar Bend, where Trudy’s art is sold alongside souvenirs for tourists.

Eighteen-year-old Maya is seeking her place in the world. She’d “been put in the foster care system after the death of her grandmother, and she’d lived in ten different homes since then.” After turning 18, Maya signed the appropriate papers permitting herself to strike out on her own, and following her instincts, she stumbles upon the quaint town of Sugar Bend, which leads her to Violet and Trudy. After a dubious beginning, the sisters come to embrace her.

Frank Roby has an unhealed past with Violet. A retired law enforcement officer, his long ago romance with Violet came to an inexplicable end, which caused him to jump at the first opportunity to accept a job in another town. After 40 years, Frank moves back to Sugar Bend from Pensacola as a widower. In rekindling his interest in birds, he goes to a class at the local Audubon Society, where he is unwittingly paired as a trainee with 63-year-old Violet. Cautious and still harboring feelings for Violet, he keeps his sentiments for her under wraps.  

Liza Bullock is an outsider who’s worked for a year as the editor of The Sugar Bend Observer. Frustrated by living in a backwater, uneventful town, “If she could find a story with enough meat on its bones, she could write a sizzling expose and land herself at a copy desk in Birmingham or Atlanta.” When a decrepit johnboat “awash with age and river detritus” mysteriously rises from Little River, Liza’s reporter instincts are ignited.

Frank Roby’s nephew works as a Sugar Bend policeman and is in the habit of asking his retired uncle for assistance. When he asks Frank to investigate the suspicious boat awash on the banks of Little River, memories of the year 1981 flash to Frank’s mind, when he was a rookie cop in the throes of a promising future with Violet and was sent to the exact location to investigate a domestic disturbance.  

Unbeknownst to the young Frank of 1981, Violet’s sister had recently married local celebrity, Jay Malone, a successful businessman the whole town revered, and who owned the house Frank was sent to look into. At the time, Frank was unaware Violet had fears for her sister, that she suspected there was more to Jay Malone than met the eye, and that the bruises Trudy tried to hide were inflicted by his hand.

Author Lauren Denton unfurls a mystery by reconciling a buried past with a modern-day story set in a town with vibrant characters brimming with Southern charm. Secrets, coincidence, family loyalty, life choices, and questions of right versus wrong as viewed through the lens of the law are woven neatly in two timeframes, seamlessly linking all characters until they each achieve, seemingly by kismet, the perfect place to land.  

Claire Fullerton’s most recent novels are Little Tea and multiple award winner, Mourning Dove. Honors include the Independent Book Publishers Book Award Silver Medal for Regional Fiction, the Reader’s Favorite for Southern Fiction Bronze Medal and various other literary awards.

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