As the novel opens Larry recounts waking up in a cabin in northern Vermont, part of a family compound where he and his wife, Sally, have been coming for many years. It is Larry's voice that tells this story of a friendship between two couples. Larry and Sally meet Charity and Sid when Larry takes up his first teaching job in Madison, Wisconsin, where Sid also teaches. In an extended flashback we learn about that magical year in Madison, where the couples become friends right off, one of those rare mutual friendships where both sets of spouses become the closest of friends. Larry is driving himself to write stories and articles on top of his teaching load, while Sid and Charity are becoming ever more deeply entwined in the life of the college and the town.

With generous returns to the “present” of Vermont, we find out about the next phase of their friendship, before returning fully to the present. This is a novel that covers most of a lifetime, so of course the joys are tempered with sadness. Even so, it is a mild story. In fact, that is one of the reasons Larry the novelist gives for not writing about the four of them: that their lives don't include the kind of drama that modern fiction demands.

I'm grateful to my book club for selecting this novel. I hadn't read anything by Stegner before. I was delighted by the first part, feeling immediately that I was in the hands of a excellent writer who delivered the best kind of story-telling, best for my tastes anyway. I was never in any doubt as to where we were with the flashbacks. I loved the length of them, while the initial and intervening scenes in Vermont were sufficiently vivid that I never forgot where we would end up.

Yet as the store progressed I became more and more uneasy. Not because the golden youth of the two couples gave way to the inevitable griefs and losses of middle-age, but because of the way the two women were presented. Sally, stricken by polio—no spoiler; we learn this in the opening pages—becomes more and more of a saint. We never see her impatient or unhappy. She's simply perfect. I find it hard to believe in a marriage that is 100%, 24×7 sweetness and light. Charity, on the other hand, appears more and more of a witch as the story goes on, until the final scenes where she behaves despicably.

One person in my book club pointed out that she had to be the most fragile of all of them to behave so, which may well be true, but Larry doesn't allow her that excuse. She is simply awful and has destroyed his old friend, Sid, in the process. Unfortunately, this depiction of the two women ruined the book for me, being too close to the old madonna/prostitute way of judging women, that they must be one or the other. Aside from the implicit misogyny, the flatness of the characters was disappointing in an otherwise excellent book. Main characters should be multi-dimensional and complex for me to fully enjoy a book. It's a major plus when even minor characters are too. Here, everyone other than the four friends, even their children, are barely shadows on the story.

Another member of my book club told us that this novel, written when the author was in his late 70s, was really a memoir. She'd met the daughter of the real-life Sid and Charity and showed us photos of the Vermont camp. I've written before about the grey area between fiction and memoir. Knowing the story was drawn from life didn't change my opinion of it. I don't know to what extent this story was fictionalised beyond changing the names. The daughter said that Stegner allowed the family to read the manuscript and deleted scenes they objected to, which surprised me given the negative depiction of Charity compared to the saintliness of Sally.

I felt this flaw of the one-dimensional women the more deeply because everything else about the story was top-notch. I will try more of his stories to see if the depiction of women is a more general problem for Stegner, or if it was just a problem in this book where his feelings for Sid surely played a role in his presentation of Charity and those for his wife affecting his depiction of Sally. If anyone out there has read this book or others by Stegner, please let me know what you think.

In this extraordinary memoir, Owens delves into his mother's past, into the childhood memories that suddenly began to surface when his mother is in her fifties. While properly skeptical and examining the controversy around recovered memories, Owens comes to believe in the terrible abuse his mother, Judy, suffered at the hands of her mother. This woman, deserted by her husband and left with a detested five-year-old, takes out her frustrations on the child. Confronted later by Owens's father, she does not deny any of it.

The book is more than a woe-is-me or even a woe-is-she memoir. Bringing together history, photos, journals and narrative, Owens contrasts his mother's horrific early life with the enchanted childhood she provided for him and his sister on Golden Glow Drive. Gradually revealed in this mosaic is Judy's amazing ability to survive and to put behind her everything she had been taught about child-rearing in order to become the loving and attentive mother she herself had longed for.

Judy received some love from her grandmother, Anna, who gave her presents which Judy's mother made her burn as soon as Anna left. I couldn't help but wonder why Anna, why any of the aunts and uncles didn't do something about the abuse of this child. Owens traces the strain of violence in the family back through Anna's husband and cousin Raymond. Anna herself took refuge in her garden from her bully of her husband. Owens also says that “children were property then, it was not one's place to intervene” and refers to the Protestant ethic of the time that called for extensive use of the rod in raising children.

He pulls back to offer some local historical context. Judy grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn and General Sullivan led a march through the area, burning crops and villages belonging to the Iroquois, causing widespread famine. Another piece of the area's history is the Helmira prison where Confederate soldiers were housed in terrible conditions. Owens talks of “lives in one century commingling with, rubbing against, those in other eras.” It is something I have wondered about, too, the presence of the past, the local history, and its effect on you as you grow up.

Further context he provides is insight into the multiple fundamentalist movements that took root in the area during the 18th century, such as the Publick Universal Friend, founded by one of Judy's own ancestors, who settled in the area, calling their land New Jerusalem. More cults settled in the area in the 19th century, their waves of evangelical firestorms giving the region the name “Burnt-Over District”. He wonders about the lasting effect of these “historical and at times hysterical passions” on the region's inhabitants. I have one of these evangelical reformers/cult founders in my family tree, one I know of anyway, and shiver at the idea that some remnant of her genes inhabits my cells.

Owens brings poetry's attention to sound and compression to this work. His narrative structure is unusual but appropriate for this fractured tale. No matter how far he pulls out, he always ties his ruminations back to his mother, her ordeal and her survival. I particularly liked the chapter where he reveals local history within the story of Judy running away from home, pausing as she passes certain landmarks to give us the necessary background, but in such an organic way that I didn't realise what he was doing until I read the book a second time.

Being alert to covers, I have to give the book designer credit for the cover. This photograph shows a man and three women all laughing. One of the women, presumably Judy's mother, has her hands around the child's neck, a child whose face and body are contorted with pain. The other adults laugh at the camera. They do not seem to notice the child's agony.

The author sent me a copy of this book to review, and I'm very glad he did. This powerful book deserves a wide audience. It is one I will never forget.

I met the author recently when we appeared together on a panel at the Virginia Festival of the Book. Although her book is designated a work of fiction, it is closely based on Dickerman-Nelson's own experience of getting pregnant at 16 while attending a Catholic school. We quickly found common ground between her experiences and my own, described in my memoir Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother. We also had a similar motivation for writing our books: to dispel or at least try to counteract the harmful stereotypes that stigmatise people in our situations.

Reading Dickerman-Nelson's book that night, what resonated most for me was her honesty. No platitudes here about slutty girls (in sharp contrast to recent political shenanigans) or irresponsibly promiscuous boys; no Splendor in the Grass tragedy with a violent ending out of an Appalachian ballad. Just a girl and a boy, completely recognisable, who are in love and believe they are about to be married and make a life together. The narrator, Judith, is a cheerleader who, far from being ostracised and condemned as one might expect, is allowed to stay in school even after she admits to her pregnancy and is supported by her loving adoptive parents. Meanwhile, Kevin struggles to stay true to their vision of a life together while enduring pressure from his family who don't want him to ruin his life by becoming a husband and father at 17. His wavering between his love for Judith and obedience to his family keep the suspense high for both Judith and the reader. No villains here, just a conflict that many people face, honestly presented.

There is nothing wrong with placing a book that is mostly memoir in the fiction category. Authors get snarky when readers assume that their novels reveal true experiences from the author's life. I, myself, had to speak sternly to my critique group when they continually referred to the protagonist of my fictional work-in-progress as though she were me. We certainly use what we have learned from our life experiences, but transform them to meet the needs of the story. One author, whose name I've forgotten, compared our experiences to butter which is used to make a cake (the novel). You would never look at a cake and say, My, what a nice block of butter. The novel is purely an invention of the author. That's why it's called fiction.

At the same time, it's true that some novels, especially first novels, are thinly disguised memoir. And, unfortunately, some so-called memoirs are mostly fictional. In the memoir workshops I teach and in online writing groups I often hear from people who want to mix a little fiction with their memoir, perhaps to make the story more interesting or to make a point more strongly. I have no problem with that, but the resulting work is not a memoir, in my opinion. It is fiction. The strength of memoir is that it tells a story that is true, that really happened to the author. There have been too many newsworthy memoirs later revealed to have been enhanced or even completely made up. The public outcry and sense of betrayal should make it clear that readers expect something called a memoir to be true. I've read much research about the fallibility of memory, so perhaps I should add “to the best of the author's ability”. So I applaud Dickerman-Nelson for calling this mostly-memoir fiction. The truth in it shines through.

I was impressed by how well the book straddles the line between Young Adult and Adult fiction. Librarians and booksellers must make a distinction between the two, but we readers just want to read what we enjoy. The voice, vocabulary and concerns are clearly those of a teen-aged girl, making it utterly appropriate as YA. Yet, the book works well for adults, too, especially those of us who have children of our own and may have forgotten our own tumultuous teens. I was so engrossed that I finished it that night, and it was well worth my bleary eyes the next day. I recommend the book, and hope that the author and I can appear together again soon.

I think I've read all of Krueger's mysteries featuring Cork O'Connor. A long series like this gives me a chance to see a character change over time. In each book O'Connor is changed, of course, but over the course of these dozen books the changes are cumulative. After as stint in the Chicago PD, Cork returned to his hometown in Tamarack County, Minnesota, where at the beginning of the series he is the sheriff, although now he is working as a private eye.

One thing that draws me back again and again is the setting of these books, the small towns, Native American reservations, and deep woods of northern Minnesota. Krueger writes knowledgeably of woodcraft, the moods of the lakes, the subtle currents of life in a town where everyone knows each other's business and have known each other all their lives. O'Connor himself is interesting: ordinary, thoughtful, stubborn. He is also one-quarter Ojibwe, a heritage he honors, forcing him often to balance competing loyalties, as he does in this book.

Vermilion One is a long-closed mine that the Department of Energy is considering for storage of nuclear waste. Among those protesting this plan, the most vocal are a group of Ojibwe led by Isaiah Broom, Cork's age, though not one of his friends. Cork has been hired to help with security after those associated with the mine received death threats. In the course of his investigation, he stumbles across long-dead bodies that he thinks might be associated with his one of father's last cases. A drift, by the way, is the term for a horizontal passage off the shaft of a mine.

This is my favorite of Krueger's books. They are all well-plotted and full of interesting characters and tidbits of information about the north country and Ojibwe customs, but this book in particular places Cork in emotional danger rather than physical danger. All the books, of course, have that element, but here it is accentuated as Cork struggles to understand and come to terms with his father's legacy as well as with the Ojibwe values inherited from his mother and nurtured in him by old Henry Meloux. Without the distraction of physical danger, the emotional struggle that underlies his investigation becomes more significant.

And it's a great read, like all Krueger's books, one that I gobbled up in a day, a pj day, one of those days I reward myself with once in a while.

I was amused at Barnes's cheek in using the same title as Frank Kermode's influential book on the theory of fiction, and even more amused when I saw a reference to it on the first page (“tick-tock”). Having just read Barnes's remarkable nonfiction book, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, a meditation on how to live with the idea that we will eventually die and disappear, I was also moved by the title and thought of Kermode's description of “our deep need for intelligible Ends.” Kermode goes on to say, “We project ourselves . . . past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle.”

I read this book twice, the first time for my book club. Tony Webster, retired, divorced, content with his unremarkable life, thinks back over his personal history, recounting episodes as he has always understood them. Then, the re-emergence of two friends from his past throws his understanding of those episodes into question.

I read quickly, page-turning indeed, to find a path out of my bafflement. Not that each scene wasn't precisely clear; it was. But I felt there was something more that I should understand, an underlying connection that was eluding me. We are set up from the beginning to expect more. “I remember” are the first words, and the first scene is from Tony's schooldays, in history class, where the new student, Adrian, makes a remark about the impossibility of ever knowing the truth about what happened. That sense of unease kept me reading until the end, although even then, as one of my book club friends said, we still don't know the truth; only what we are told by Tony.

History, time, memory: these are potent subjects, all the more so for me having just read Absalom, Absalom.

I actually enjoyed my second reading even more, going more slowly, seeing how each detail fit neatly into the whole. What a gem of a book! Tony has always felt in control of his life, but when he examines his memories, he finds instead that he has let things happen to him, settled for a peaceful life instead of the extravagant dreams of youth. What he believed were free choices were constrained by the forms imposed by his historical context (the times), and his understanding of them colored by his need for causality.

Kermode talks (with reference to Iris Murdoch and Ortega y Gasset) about the impossibility of a novel ever actually being true to life. A novel “imposes causality, development, character, a past which matters and a future within certain broad limits determined by the project of the author rather than that of the characters. They have their choices, but the novel has its end.” Thus, I was amused all over again by this meta-fiction, both the author and the narrator struggling to balance the messy facts of a life with the structure we require. The trick that Barnes pulls on the reader, well, me anyway, is to maintain all the uncertainty while creating a solid structure with every detail slotted into place.

Brilliant.

The author asked me to read and review this book, which he described as “a kind of Bildungsroman of my psychological life as a writer, psychotherapist, spiritual seeker, and teacher”. Intrigued, I agreed.

The book is a collection of short essays in three parts. The first and longest part is indeed about the life described above. The essays in the brief second part are mostly about films and actors, while those in the third part are mostly about members of his family. Contrary to my expectations, I found the latter two parts the most interesting. The often stilted prose of the first part smoothed out and became more natural. I also felt that the author was actually trying to convey something to me, to the reader.

This blog of mine grew out of the reading journal I kept where I noted what I as a writer learned from books that I read. What I learned from this book is how important it is to revise with the reader in mind. By that I don't mean write for the market—vampire books are selling well, so that's what I'll write—but take at least one editing pass through the book reading it as your reader will. Even better, have someone whose taste and honesty you trust read it. My writing group gave me invaluable assistance in this regard, telling me where I had not provided enough information or left the reader adrift after a flashback.

In the first essay in the book, Freese recounts how an early short story of his was published in The Best American Short Stories of 1975 under another author's name, an error he was unable to correct. From this experience he “learned a remarkable truth”: that he had worth as a writer and that he did not need “the fruit” of publication or public approval. In another essay he says, “Because I need to explain myself as I sojourn, I write not to entertain (shush!). I write not to sell, convince, or massage, much less condition. I write for the only audience that counts and that is me.”

He several times quotes Krishnamurti saying that every society is corrupt and refers to himself over and over as an outsider who has “de-conditioned” himself from the expectations of other people. That's fine, but at some point a writer must consider his reader, if he expects to have one. In his book On Writing Stephen King advises writers to close the door and write the first draft for themselves, but with the second draft, open the door and think of the reader.

In the essays in the first part, I found many opinions but little information to substantiate or give context to them. I also found almost no one besides the author. A few times he mentioned others—a student he felt sorry for; a wealthy mother and daughter at an auction; a blogger who wrote a savage review of his book, making him feel he “was being tortured by a Nazi”—but he says this student is just like the ones before and after him; the mother and daughter were as disgusting as all rich people with their conspicuous consumption during a recession; the blogger is just as vain, incompetent and ignorant as all bloggers. Perhaps this says more about my taste as a reader than about the book, but I was thrilled to get to the second part and read a whole essay about Buster Keaton. Then one about Peter Lorre! Or perhaps I just preferred reading what Freese admired about these artists rather than his contempt for our corrupt society and the Yahoos that populate it.

The best books, for me, are conversations. I was relieved to finish the first part where I felt someone was talking at me and move on to the second part where I felt someone was speaking with me. The third part, about Freese's family, moved me. I will long remember his Grandma Fanny, a free spirit, sometime seamstress, and surprising woman. Echoes of the young enchantress still hover around the elderly gypsy dragging her colorful hoardings from one garret to another. I love the vision of her tearing at a herring and gnawing on a piece of hard pumpernickel with her few remaining teeth. This lesson, too, I will take from the book: how effective sensory details can be in presenting a distinctive and astonishing life in just a few pages.

Otsuka's book gives us the lives of Japanese picture brides starting with their journey to the U.S. in the early 20th century. Contrary to the prosperous images promised them in letters, the men they married were mostly farmworkers, usually older and less attractive than the photographs the women had pored over before and during the journey. These women worked in the fields, as did the children they bore, and, later, as shop clerks and maids in the homes of the wealthy. We stay with them from the initial betrayal by their husbands through all the others that follow, the burden of poverty and discrimination, the small victories, up through the forced migration to the internment camps during World War II. It is a sad and moving story, filled with small details that drive home the realities they faced.

However, it was not quite as moving as I expected it to be. I felt distant from the women in the book, observing their pain but not feeling it. The reason, I believe, is that the book is written completely in the first person plural: we did this; one of us did that. While the details mount around the reader, there is no single person to follow or identify with, no central character, just the chorus. The details are all that one can ask for: specific, colorful, connected. The language is perfect, conveying their trials with dignity, without complaint. The thread of a common story emerges, but no individual faces. Perhaps if I were not already familiar with the story of these women and the suffering of hard-working Americans of Japanese descent in the internment camps, I would have been more shocked.

I loved and was fully invested in Joshua Ferris's remarkable Then We Came to the End, also written in first person plural. The difference is that, without losing his collective viewpoint, Ferris identified individuals I could care about, such as Lynn Mason, Joe Pope, and Tom Mota. Here, there is no one we stay with for more than a sentence. For example, this is how we learn about the children:

Some of them were stubborn and wilful and would not listen to a word we said. Others were more serene than the Buddha. He came into the world smiling. One loved her father more than anyone else. One hated bright colors. One would not go anywhere without his tin pail . . . They played by themselves all day long without making a sound while we worked nearby in the fields. They drew pictures in the dirt for hours. And whenever we tried to pick them up and carry them home they shook their heads and said, ‘I'm too heavy' or ‘Mama, rest.' They worried about us when we were tired. They worried about us when we were sad. They knew, without our telling them, when our knees were bothering us . . .

So, however beautifully written, I came away a little dissatisfied. I wanted individual faces to emerge from the crowd, so that I could give them the respect and attention due to each person. But that's my problem, not the book's. If I look at it as a prose poem, as some reviewers have suggested, then I have no complaint. I also see that I should look up her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, which follows a single family. For this new book, though, Otsuka has done an amazing amount of research and written an important and accomplished story. I hope many people read it and learn more about the details of these lives that threaten to disappear under the accumulation of history.

Atwood is best known for her novels such as Alias, Grace and The Handmaid's Tale, but it is her poetry that I have most valued. She writes in clear, compelling language, yet each poem contains a moment of surprise, of opening out into something beyond what I thought I understood. These revelatory connections and enlightenment—moments of being as Virginia Woolf called them, the leaping poetry Robert Bly described his book of that name—are what I look for in poetry. And what she refers to in “Poetry reading” in this volume, a description of a “well-known poet — ransacking his innards”. Understanding his compulsion, why he is not a bricklayer or dentist (“Hard-shelled. Impervious.”), detecting the craft behind the emotion, she is still surprised and struck.

Today poets are sometimes urged to make a single narrative of their poetry collection. Atwood has said that she writes individual poems, not volumes. She does not look ahead to how they might work together. I find the process of assembling a manuscript fascinating, entranced by how a poem changes when you set it next to another. Here, the book is divided into five sections. The first has to do with childhood and family; the second with the role of the poet, a theme she has come back to in several volumes. Writing in the turbulent second half of the 20th century, she has addressed political concerns while denying that the writer has a responsibility to society: “Books don't change the world.”

Yet she is still negotiating this relationship, and the poems of the third section address the wrongs of our society without the biting anger of True Stories but rather the insight of age. In “White Cotton T-Shirt” she remembers being a carefree teen-ager, saying “Ignorance makes all things clean. / Our knowledge weighs us down. We want it gone” yet goes on to write about Joan of Arc and war veterans who have kept “a hoard of buttons cut from corpses / as souvenirs”. Her writing has been called Northern Gothic and there are plenty of deliciously terrible images here. This is, after all, the woman who said that Grimm's Fairy Tales was the most influential book she ever read.

The fourth section seems almost a conversation with the preceding two sections. In poems such as “Enough of these discouragements, she defends the horrors she plumbs. “You wanted fire” she says. In “Another Visit to the Oracle” she says:

What would you prefer?

You'd like me to amuse you?

Do some jigs, or pranks? . . .

That's not what I do.

What I do: I see

in darkness. I see

darkness. I see you.

The last section reminds me that the poems in this 2007 book are those of a woman in her late 60s. Having addressed the horrors and dangers of our world, the loss of childhood and innocence, Atwood gives us the consolations of age, though slyly comparing them to the band on the Titanic in “Boat Song”. She talks of hearing “the man you love / talking to himself in the next room” and, listening, we are given the sense of what it means to share so long a life.

In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Atwood wrote: “Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.” This is what she has done for me, discovered my fears and secret joys and brought them out to the light.

It's not a promising premise for a book: one man's fear of death. Yet Barnes' wit and learning kept me turning pages, nodding and chuckling. The jibes are at himself; he admits to feeling competitive about the age he first woke to death-awareness (a moment Charles du Bos called le réveil mortel): thirteen or fourteen to his friend G.‘s ridiculously early age of four “(four! you bastard!)”. Throughout the book, Barnes contrasts his own approach as a novelist to questions about death and what comfort may be derived from various sources with those of his brother who is a philosopher. Their paths diverged at an early age, which Barnes attributes to his brother being bottle-fed, unlike himself. He goes on to turn this assumption, as with others in this fascinating book, on its head, pulling it apart to try to discover the truth of the matter.

Barnes also looks at how other novelists, philosophers, composers, and so on who are brooders about death make of these questions. He wonders if we would wish to be conscious during our dying, citing Roy Porter who did “‘Because, you know, you'd just be missing out on something otherwise.'” Jules Renard, whom Barnes calls “one of my dead, French, non-blood relatives”, famous for a novel set in his native village of Chitry, experienced three deaths in the space of twelve years: his father's suicide, his brother's sudden collapse while at work, and his mother's drowning in a well, which may have been an accident or another suicide. At his brother's gravesite, Renard notices a fat worm on the edge of the grave seeming to be celebrating. He says, “‘All I feel is a kind of anger at death and its imbecile tricks.'”

That worm returns near the end of the book as Barnes stands over the Renard family grave. This return to certain images and ideas helps to tie together what is essentially a long essay. Barnes hews closely to his main idea—how can we come to terms with our inevitable end?—but the little excursions are what make the book delightful. At one point, he visits the graves of other non-blood relatives. In a cemetery in Deauville, he uses his rental car keys to clear the lichen from the gravestone, but the spacing of the letters is a bit odd, so the name he actually reveals is FORD MAD OXFORD. His graveyard visits lead Barnes to meditate about some reader perhaps cleaning Barnes's own tombstone one day, and to examine what comfort may be drawn from the ongoing life of books, one's creations. Cold comfort, he concludes, citing once-famous authors who have fallen out of fashion and the likely demise of physical books in our online world. He deals similarly with other proposed panaceas: religion, release from pain, the need to make room for others, children and genetic immortality, the famous bird from medieval poetry that flies into a lighted hall and then out of it again.

Barnes is amusing on the subject of last words, admiringly citing an otherwise undistinguished teacher who had decided to say simply, “Damn!” However, he goes on to dash cold water on the most gloriously planned exit lines by describing the reality of the person's final hours. I recently said of a friend that he made a good death, meaning that on his last day he displayed a dignity and courage I'd not expected from him, or from anyone for that matter. In his shoes, or hospital gown rather, I'd have been curled up against the bed's bars howling.

Fear of death—my own death—has never absorbed much of my attention. I've certainly worried about running out of time to do the things I want to do. And feared the possibility of dementia. But a long time ago, before I was even out of my teens and long before starting to study Eastern religions, I made the decision to live every day and as a result don't feel that I've missed out on anything.

Even without sharing Barnes's preoccupation, though, I found the book fascinating enough to tear through it in just a few days. The primary ideas I will take away from this book are his final remarks on narrative and memory.

I'd heard good things about this series featuring Dr. Siri, the 74-year-old National Coroner of Laos. Set in the late 1970s, the story provides a portrait of life in the new People's Democratic Republic of Laos and its uneasy relationship with its neighbors' new regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia. This historical and political background, though important, is sketched in briefly, a sentence here and there, barely discernible in the flow of the story in which Dr. Siri is called in on three related murders, young women who have been impaled by curiously sharpened épées.

Cotterill shows a Laos that seems less repressive than my preconceptions. Dr. Siri and his old friend, Civilai, carry on amusingly about the absurdities of the bureaucracy without fear of repercussions. They even feel safe enough to make fun of and try to undermine the applications for hero status which they have been invited to submit. Though the serious clerk does pull them up sharp with her own remarks, there are no threats or reprisals.

My favorite parts of the story are these conversations between the two friends, many at the cigarette and alcohol stand behind the market whose proprietor is called Two Thumbs because both of his thumbs are on one hand. When Civilai is asked to go on a diplomatic mission to Cambodia, supposedly just a public relations jaunt, he nominates his friend Siri as his companion. Siri agrees, remembering happy days in Phnom Penh with his first wife, Boua. He assumes his investigation will be wrapped up by then, even though Inspector Phosy seems set on the wrong suspect.

I found the investigation fascinating, with unexpected twists and turns complicated by the unfamiliar (to me) culture. I also liked that in the rush of the story, Cotterill found time for small descriptions that evoke the scenes and the way of life, such as the two-story spirit house constructed by Siri's wife Daeng. The upstairs is for the ancestors, protected with buddhas, incense, and wooden elephants, while the downstairs is for the phaphoom, spirits displaced from the land, their consumer longings appeased by doll furniture, toy tv and miniature Mercedes Benz. The rainy season has stayed beyond its limits, as though to make up for the previous year's drought, and as the story gathers speed we see rain finally begin to seep into a corner of the morgue where Siri's assistants, Nurse Dtui and Geung, construct a dam of sandbags. This corner eventually becomes a pond with a couple of water lilies.

Cotterill handles the mix of humor and gravity beautifully. Civilai, Phosy, Daeng, Dtui, Geung and other characters emerge as people interesting in themselves. Less successful to my mind were the interspersed scenes of a future or past situation involving Dr. Siri. Still, there was much to interest me, and I'll certainly look for more in the series.