fiction

The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans

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Sitting alone in her Baltimore home, 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp communicates with the world primarily through letters, the kind you put in envelopes and mail. This novel consists exclusively of her letters to and from friends, family, public figures she admires, and others she has, as my Baltimore mother used to say, a bone to pick with.

I was initially skeptical, as was at least one other person in my book club, that a collection of letters could amount to a novel worthy of the effusive praise this one has earned. Every book club I know is reading it. I’ve read other epistolary novels, and they’re okay but not as good as a traditional novel in my opinion. This one is.

First of all, Sybil fascinates me. She’s a complicated woman. Acerbic and prickly she may be, but as a retired lawyer she values words and enjoys living alone. The letters constitute a protective covering, allowing her to communicate with others while maintaining strict control over her privacy. At the same time, she is writing letters to an unnamed recipient that are never sent, and these reveal what she is really thinking.

Second, unlikely as it may sound, her quiet life whips up enough tension and suspense to make the reader not want to look away for a second. Not only are Sybil’s health and eyesight beginning to fail, not only does she long to heal the rifts in her relationship with her two children, but suddenly the world is more with her than she expected. A surprising friendship with a neighbor, Theodore Lübeck, upsets her solitude, as does a brash Texan with romance on his mind.

Events accelerate. She is asked to be responsible for a child and to heal her relationship with her ex-husband. A stalker sends her threatening letters. Regrets about her past coldness to others pile up. Members of my book club couldn’t stop reading. We loved all the humor and human interest. Also, being based in Baltimore, we appreciated the local settings and all the literary references. Sybil is a reader like us!

We also praised the author’s writerly skills. The order of the letters is nicely balanced between recipients to show different sides of Sybil’s character, and arranged in such a way that they keep us waiting and wondering about the outcome of a particular exchange for just the right amount of time, i.e., we remained interested without being annoyed. Also, I thought the unsent letters a masterful solution to the need to show her inner thoughts.

A few members complained that some of the story lines had unrealistic, “Pollyanna-ish” endings. I don’t disagree. At the same time, I think the author did a good job of portraying a woman contemplating the end of her life and trying to come to terms with her regrets, guilt, and failures over the course of her life.

Some of us went out and bought stationery and plan to write some real letters. We talked about how much value we have found in reading collections of letters and how biographers rely on them. We wondered what will happen in the future, since almost no one writes letters anymore. Our emails and texts seem both permanent and ephemeral. In the future, will anyone publish collections of emails, or will that sense of everyday life be lost?

When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone, not an email or text, but a physical letter?

Ocean State, by Stewart O’Nan

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Sometimes an author writes about a place or time or circumstance that so accurately reflects a slice of your experience that reading their work feels like coming home. Their people are your people, so familiar, so themselves. Stewart O’Nan’s novels are like that for me.

At its heart, this story set in Ashaway, Rhode Island, in 2009 is about four women. Three of them are a constellation, a solid triangle: overweight and overlooked Marie, her older sister Angel—the beautiful one, the popular one—and their divorced mother Carol. Angel’s classmate Birdy is the fourth woman, with her own sister and mother. Birdy’s family is of Portuguese heritage, as so many people in that area are. Through these four women’s voices, the author takes us deep into their lives.

My library attaches a little comment form inside the back cover of novels so patrons can rate the book. On it, one person wrote that the characters were interesting but there was no plot. There is indeed a plot, though an unusual one: A reverse-chronology story starts with the ending and then proceeds to take us there. It’s hard to do in a way that doesn’t feel manipulative, but O’Nan succeeds, beginning the story with Marie’s earnest and honest voice.

When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl. She was in love, my mother said, like it was an excuse. She didn’t know what she was doing. I had never been in love then, not really, so I didn’t know what my mother meant, but I do now.

Both Angel and Birdy are fully and irrevocably in love with their classmate Myles. Angel and Myles have been together for three years, a legendary couple at their school, even though his well-to-do parents don’t approve of her. But he’s started seeing Birdy secretly as well, another triangle. We don’t learn much about Myles—he seems to be one of Gatsby’s careless people—but it’s not his story. Here’s Birdy leaving to meet him.

“I’m leaving,” she calls.

With a scraping her mother gets up from her chair and comes to see her off, tottering on her bad knees, the good water glasses inside the hutch tinkling as she crosses the dining room. Her mother is the wisest person she knows, attuned to the whole family’s moods. She knew Josefina was pregnant with Luz before Josephina did. Now Birdy’s sure she can tell, and hugs her too tightly, makes a show of taking her stupid visor from its peg. Everything she does is a lie.

They are all stuck in their places in this remote corner of the tiniest state in the country, in a mill-town where the mills have closed. The houses are wonderfully described, from the expensive beachfront mansion belonging to Myles’s parents where he takes his women for privacy, to the tumble-down house where Carol and her daughters live, across the road from the abandoned mill where her parents once worked. Marie says:

We weren’t happy that fall, in that rotting, underwater house, with everything we’d already lost, and everything still to come, but lying safe and warm under my grandmother’s afghan, eating popcorn and stealing glances at my funny, beautiful sister as the light played over her face, I wished we could stay there forever.

The bigger story is of people with—really—such modest dreams, whose lives are constricted by an economy and a society that offer little hope of achieving them. Carol wants a better life for her daughters, better than her job as an aide at a home for the elderly or Angel’s after-school work at CVS. Carol’s only plan to achieve that is to find a man, but her daughters call each new boyfriend a loser. Their father, too, is stuck. He comes around now and then to fix things and takes his daughters every other weekend to stay in his apartment over a Chinese restaurant.

I love O’Nan’s tenderness towards his characters, and I’m amazed by how accurately he summons the voices of these four women. Each page is sprinkled with little surprises: jolts of familiarity and unexpected insight. They combine with the compelling story to lure me on and on, even though I’ve been warned from the beginning that it will end in tragedy.

What novel have you read that feels like coming home?

The Book of I, by David Greig

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In 825 CE a Viking ship approaches a tiny island off the Scottish coast. Named “I” (modern-day Iona), the island is holy, home to an abbey founded by St. Columba in the sixth century. A few peasants are the only other inhabitants. The Vikings, including one Grimur, proceed to raid the abbey for its relics and treasures, killing everyone they can find in the process.

It’s a grim opening, and one that made me put off reading this story for a while, but I’m glad I took the book up again because what follows the raid is quite remarkable.

Three people survive. Young Brother Martin, to his lasting shame, hides in the latrine while the other monks offer themselves joyously to martyrdom. After killing her abusive husband the blacksmith, Grimur spares Una when she gives him her astonishing mead. In his resulting stupor, Grimur is assumed to be dead by his fellows and is left behind on the island.

With their varying strengths and weaknesses, not to mention their conflicting values and beliefs, they must find a way to live and work together. The pace slows as they move through their days. “Saint Fillan, the monastery cat stretches in the sun. Things happen and then they pass.”

They labor in their various ways: Grimur to learn about agriculture, art, Christianity and family; Una to keep them alive with her bees and mead and gardens; and Martin to restore the abbey and complete the illuminated manuscript—The Book of I—that the monks were working on before the raid.

Copying was not a simple act of reproduction. It was also a type of prayer, the way to a deeper understanding of scripture. Writing out lines was a meditation on meanings and hidden meanings. Illustrations appeared on the page in a dream state of grace.

I’m fascinated by stories of people creating a society from scratch, whether it’s the television series Deadwood or Octavia Butler’s brilliant Parable of the Sower, so I welcomed the languid pace and contemplative moments. Discarding traditional plot structure with its reliance on conflict, Greig presents the story almost as a succession of the monastery cat’s quiet days, brief chapters that beautifully evoke life on the island.

Now it was high summer. Night made hardly a smear on the long blue days. The island had long forgotten the ache of winter’s grip. Bees hovered over the flowers in the garden even into the late evening. Small birds shouted to each other in the oak grove.

The author is better known as a playwright which shows in his confident handling of this unconventional story.  He even manages to weave some quiet humor into what one would expect to be a bleak tale. “He was so gentle with the beast. So careful with the udder. How could these be the same hands that had killed the smith? Maybe he just really likes tits?”

Greig’s book—more a novella—is part of a series called The Darkland Tales, retellings of stories from Scotland’s history, myth and legend. His is drawn from the tale of the martyrdom of Saint Blathmac by Viking raiders in 825. If the rest of the series is as good as this story, I’m eager to read them all.

Have you read any of The Darkland Tales?

The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak

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Teenaged Ada, whose name means “island” in Turkish, feels isolated living with her father Kostas in 2010s England. Her parents emigrated from Cyprus before she was born, first Kostas and later Defne, who has died before the story begins. In a powerful scene at the beginning of the book, Ada is called upon in the classroom but, frustrated at being misunderstood by her teacher and classmates, she begins to scream and cannot stop.

If she could only learn about her past, especially her parents’ lives on Cyprus and their reasons for leaving, she might at least be able to feel a connection to the past. A second timeline in the story takes us to that past: the 1970s when Cyprus ison the cusp of the violence that will erupt between the Greek and Turkish populations and cause the partition of the island, with a Turkish state in the north (recognised only by Turkey) and a Greek state in the south. Since Kostas is Greek and Defne Turkish, their romance must be kept secret.

A third and surprisingly substantial storyline is narrated by a fig tree in Kostas’s garden. It’s less of a story, though, than a tranche of information.

Most members of my book club loved the book. Indeed Shafak’s prose is often lovely, and if you don’t know anything about the history and culture of Cyprus, you can immerse yourself in luscious details about food, customs and proverbs—fruit bats, butterflies, all kinds of information—before shuddering at the terrible violence.

Others found it uneven and struggled to stay engaged. The time-shifting got in the way for a couple of us. The story sometimes stayed too long with one timeline, so that we had trouble reconnecting when it finally moved to the other. Some complained that the fig tree’s orations were long-winded and didactic, perhaps partly because much of the information overlapped with The Overstory by Richard Powers.

I found this an ambitious novel and respect Shafak for taking on so many themes and elements. We get Cypriot history, online shaming, prejudice against gay couples, the first- and second-generation immigrant experience, global warming, mental health issues, parenting, bullying, generational trauma and more.

I love the premise of two Cypriot teenagers with a forbidden love who choose to cut their daughter off from the past. However, I struggled with the execution. Overwhelmed by so much content, what suffers are plot and character development. My book club noticed that the scream—so memorable!—is never referred to again after those first few pages and wished the author had done more with it. Other bits are mentioned and then dropped. I had trouble following the plot in both the present and the past timelines. The characters, too, are barely developed. I wanted to know Ada better and Kostas and Defne.

As editor Peter Gelfan recently wrote in Jane Friedman’s blog,

Over the millennia and across just about every culture, a plot-like structure is how stories seem to work. If you have a good reason to depart from it, you better also have something else to take up the slack in reader engagement . . .

A story’s premise is the what-if seed that spawns the whole project . . . Sometimes an author gets so excited by his premise that instead of turning it into a plot, he simply takes the reader on a guided tour as the premise plays out. He might bring in a character, or a series of them, whose dialogue explains what’s going on. Other writers conduct their tours through promiscuously multiple points of view, zipping readers as if on a magic carpet from one site to the next.

I did feel as though I were on a magic carpet being zipped around. Some reviewers call the book enchanting and magical and I can see why. Plus I’m often drawn to books with experimental structures. Maybe if I reread this one with different expectations, I will end up loving it as much as the majority of my book club.

If a novel has gotten tons of praise and positive reviews, does that affect your expectations for the book?

Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson

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The cover gives the twist away. At least that’s what I thought before deciding with a sigh that I would actually read this story one of my book clubs chose. However, Lillian’s voice pulled me right in, and I raced right through to the end.

At twenty-eight Lillian is living in her mother’s attic, smoking pot and working dead-end jobs. Long ago she’d hoped to escape from this life by earning a scholarship to an exclusive prep school where she became besties with her roommate Madison, a spoiled rich girl. When Madison gets caught in a scandal, Lillian ends up taking the fall and basically gives up on life.

Now Madison needs her again and Lillian can’t help responding to the call. “I tried to think of a time when I hadn’t done what Madison had asked me to do. That time did not exist.”

Married to a senator with presidential ambitions, Madison needs to figure out how to handle the sudden imposition of the Senator’s twins from a previous marriage who are coming to live with them. She hires Lillian—the one person she can trust to keep a secret—to care for them. They are to be hidden away in a guesthouse while Madison finds a way to keep the twins permanently out of sight.

Why? Because Bessie and Roland burst into flames when they are angry or upset.

They are not harmed, though their clothes and everything else around them burn. Lillian doubts her ability to care for any child, much less these two. Her own mother is no role model, gambling away whatever money she can lay her hands on. Plus, as Lillian is the first to tell us, failure is her middle name.

So instead of wanting more, sometimes I just made myself want even less. Sometimes I made myself believe that I wanted nothing, not even food or air. And if I wanted nothing, I’d just turn into a ghost. And that would be the end of it.

The real twist in the story is how Lillian in her own weird way confronts the bizarre challenge of caring for these stubborn, angry and fiery children while shut away in secrecy.

I appreciate stories like this one where every aspect is completely realistic except for one magical element. Magical? Impossible? Anyone who has had to deal with a young child who has BIG FEELINGS might be forgiven for thinking the author is only slightly exaggerating.

Wilson brings so much humor and real insight to the story without shading into sentimentality. Even the rare tender moment is earned by all that has come before.

Some might feel that Madison, the Senator, and Lillian’s mother are flat or predictable. In my long life, I’ve lived among the very rich and among the very poor, and all three characters struck me as true to life. I’ve known so many people like them. It’s a challenge for a writer, though, to depict people who insist on acting like the worst caricatures of themselves.

What first registered for me in this story are the social barriers for anyone who is different. It’s not just senators who try to project an image of a perfect family, hiding away their rebellious or inconvenient children and relatives. You don’t have to spontaneously combust; it’s enough to be just slightly different for people to shy away from you or hysterically call for protection. In my small town quite a few people are screaming about a crime wave, but a question quickly finds that they are talking about panhandlers, none of whom have actually been violent or threatening in any way, just different. Panhandling, of course, is not a crime.

Then I came to believe that Wilson’s story—fun as it is to read—can be seen as being about power: what sort of power each character possesses, whether they know it or not, and how they use it.

Yet in the end, it is Lillian who lingers in my mind weeks after finishing the book, what she finds in the children and in herself. Her mother also stays with me, someone who, for all her faults, always allows her daughter to come home.

Can you recommend another novel that is both fun and thought-provoking?

The Secret Staircase, by Jill Barklem

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The children in my life love this story, part of the Brambly Hedge series. They are fascinated by the idea of a hidden stair and rooms that have long been locked up. Who isn’t? Surely I wasn’t the only child who went around tapping on walls and measuring the inside and outside of houses, hoping to find a secret passage or cobweb-laden room that no one remembered was there.

In this story, young Wilfred arrives at the Old Oak Palace along with Mr. Apple and the other children to prepare for that night’s big midwinter’s eve celebration. Lord Woodmouse and his daughter Primrose welcome them, and the two children go off to find costumes and to practice the poem they are to recite.

With all the bustling preparations Wilfred and Primrose have trouble finding a quiet place to practice until they enter a crowded storeroom at the end of a passage. However, they get distracted by all the things around them. Primrose explores a dresser and finds a small key in a drawer. Wilfred pulls at a green curtain that reveals a locked door hidden behind it. To their delight, Primrose’s key opens it.

Thus begins their adventure, all the more beguiling because of Barklem’s illustration of a secret stairway within the huge oak tree.

Why are we so drawn to hidden passages, mysterious rooms, and secret gardens? Though I was a practical child, I liked to imagine there was more to the world than the bare bones I could see, hear and touch. It could be a legend, a family story, or a bit of history about a place. It could even be the possibility that a dense forsythia bush hid a unicorn.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about adding what he called shimmer to his stories. He said that creating histories and legends around ordinary objects made them more real by adding the dimension of time—hence all his references in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to certain legends and songs. Sketching in those shimmering ghosts of the past can deepen the texture of the world in any story.

I’ve always been fascinated by houses anyway. My walk to and from school took me past a variety of houses large and small. I’d try to guess the layout of the bedrooms from what I could see of the windows and decide which room I would want to have. I used one of my favorites as the cover for my poetry collection Terrarium.

Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space says:

. . . if the house is a bit elaborate, if It has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams . . . In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.

Another reason to search for these hidden spaces is the thrill of entering a place where no one has been for years and years. Or perhaps ever: my brother, a lifelong caver, was part of the first team to explore Lechuguilla when it was discovered in New Mexico. He described for me that feeling of being the first person ever to step into a particular chamber.

While that’s not something I’ll probably ever experience, I like the idea of including a little bit of mystery in stories by the discovery of some hidden place. Adding shimmer to the place by giving it a history or legend would deepen its appeal. Perhaps readers would add their own shimmer as they remember being young and looking for a disguised door that might hide a secret staircase.

Did you ever search for hidden passages or secret spaces when you were young?

Parnassus on Wheels, by Christopher Morley

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When I was in Madrid in the 1990s, walking the streets in the evening, I glanced down a short, dead-end alley and was astonished by what I saw. Earlier in the day I’d visited the book stalls lining the Cuesta de Moyano, a small pedestrian street by El Retiro Park, and thought myself in heaven. So many books! So many book lovers!

Now, though, in that dim alley, I saw a young man grasp the bottom of a wooden board hanging on the stone wall and lift it to reveal shelves of  books. He propped the board up to be an awning and was ready for business.

Not only was I charmed by this unexpected bookshop and wished I could change places with him—what a life that would be!—but I was also reminded of a story I’d read twenty-some years earlier. In it a man had made a horse-drawn wagon, something like a Romany vardo, with sides that opened to reveal shelves of books. He traveled about the countryside selling books to farmers and townsfolk and “evangelizing” about the delights of reading.

Published in 1917, Morley’s novella is about Helen, a former governess who cooks and keeps house for her bachelor brother Andrew on their farm. Ever since Andrew started writing books and unexpectedly became famous, she’s become disenchanted with her life, left alone on the farm while he travels about giving readings and looking for inspiration.

Then one day Roger Mifflin drives his traveling bookshop into their farmyard. A short, balding man with a red beard, he has a gift for holding forth on the wonders of books and life on the road. However, he’s now decided to retire and sell his creation, and he thinks Andrew is just the person to take his place.

So does Helen. Foreseeing many more months of being left to tend the farm alone, she takes the remarkable step of buying the Traveling Parnassus herself. Though only 39 and a self-described “fat old woman,” she’s inspired to kick over the traces and set out on a bookselling trip herself.

They decide that she’ll drive Roger to the train station which will take a few days, and along the way he’ll tutor her in the business. As she and Roger travel the New England country roads, adventures ensue.

It’s been more than fifty years since I first read this delightful, old-fashioned story. I’d forgotten the details of those adventures, but I’ve never forgotten Roger’s joyous literary orations or the Traveling Parnassus itself. I’ve never forgotten my dream of a life surrounded by books and sharing them with others.

If you’re looking for something that reminds you of the joy that life holds, The Parnassus on Wheels is a great place to start.

Have you reread a book from your youth and found it better than ever? Did it change your life?

Time of the Child, by Niall Williams

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Williams returns to the fictional Irish village of Faha, where a lone doctor, Jack Troy, sees to the medical needs of those who live there. A widower, two of his daughters have married and gone, while 29-year-old Ronnie keeps house for him. Every day seems much like the last, although it being December (1962), some of the usual seasonal shenanigans are afoot. His patients even seem to have inherited the ills that plagued their parents, as attested to by the notes left by Jack’s father, the previous doctor.

Jack often pulls out his father’s sayings, like smooth stones he keeps in his pockets. “The sick are ourselves . .. When you stop understanding that, take your name off the wall and throw your bag in the river.” Yet Jack holds himself aloof from others, maybe because of his position and his sorrows or perhaps just the weight of all the secrets his patients confide in him.

I loved Williams’s earlier book This Is Happiness. The man can write about the big emotions without sentimentality. He treats all his obstreperous characters with gentle humor and tenderness and respect. There are some outsized characters here for sure, but he never invites us to laugh at them, just to appreciate them for themselves. I love this description of Ronnie:

Like the triangle that has one leg longer than the other, Ronnie had an asymmetrical relation with Faha. She was and was not part of the community, known by everyone, but kept at that distance that had too many causes, but was condensed into the phrase, the doctor’s eldest. And, because she was the one who opened the door to patients in the morning, the one who wrote their names in the book, helped those who needed help getting to chairs in the waiting room, help rising from them, and getting down the creaking hall into the riverward room of the surgery, she shared the perspective of those statues prayed to across the penny candles: she knew the parish through its illnesses. She was also the only person in the parish you could tell your complaint and not hear that she had that too or was suffering from worse.

As you can see, his writing is extraordinary: tangled sentences that somehow always make sense and capture the peculiar voice—syntax and sayings—of the residents of Faha. And that last sentence!

Although there are brief references to it, starting with the title, the promised child doesn’t appear until almost the halfway mark. Some may complain about that, but I say: Who cares about standard story structure when there is so much entertaining wordplay and so many wild events to enjoy, such as rebellious cattle being driven to a market that itself mixes chaos with kindness? I also didn’t mind the slow pace because every page is so rich with music and humor and heart.

This book is a treasure. I was almost afraid to read it, fearing it couldn’t possibly be as good as Happiness. It’s better: a genuinely moving story about what we are and can be to each other.

What novel have you read about what ties a community together or tears it apart?

The Quiet Librarian, by Allen Eskens

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Hana Babić is at work in the stacks of her library in Minnesota when she is approached by Detective David Claypool. He tells her that her best friend Amina is dead, possibly murdered, in a fall from her balcony.

I expected Hana to be shocked and saddened by the news, and she is. What I didn’t expect was for her to immediately become tense and guarded.

Claypool came to Hana because he is investigating Amina’s death, and her will names Hana as the guardian for her young grandson Dylan. Hana responds by stating that there is no way Amina committed suicide. Her firm convictions and thoughts reveal her to be something more than the modest, self-effacing woman her colleagues call “the sweater lady” because of her cardigans.

It turns out that Hana originally lived in Bosnia as Nura Divjak. At the start of the war, 17-year-old Nura vows to find and kill the Serbs who raped her mother and murdered her family. Eventually she joins a militia as a warrior and spy. She’s so feared by the Serbs that a legend grows up around her; they call her the Night Mora. When they put a bounty on her head, the militia help her emigrate to the U.S. with a new identity.

Now she wonders if that 30-year-old bounty is what led to Amina’s death. Amina would never have revealed Hana’s identity and whereabouts; she’d proven her ability to withstand torture back in Bosnia. Hana feels responsible and must protect Dylan as well as find her friend’s murderer.

As the tension grows, the story moves back and forth between the two time frames: Bosnia in 1995, where the details of Hana’s past emerge, and the present day in Minnesota, where she has to decide how much to reveal to Claypool and whether to help him or work independently.

I often wanted to look away, overwhelmed by the tragedies I experienced along with Hana, but I couldn’t. Such a complex and fascinating character! I just wanted to learn all I could about her and her life. The other thing that kept me reading had to do with the way the author withheld and revealed information. I would love to see his map for the book, if he had one.

Eskers also does such a good job of arranging the two storylines so that, despite their covering different places and times and events, the book feels unified. The jump between the two never felt jarring to me. However, it did seem unrealistic that a detective would reveal so much information to a stranger and potential suspect.

I came away with the song War, by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, in my head. What makes people one day turn on their neighbors and believe that they are justified in raping and killing them and stealing their property? If you avenge your family’s death by killing their murderers and then their survivors come after you, where does the cycle of revenge end?

“War . . . What is it good for?”

Have you read an absorbing historical fiction book with a dual timeline?

Bruno, Chief of Police, by Martin Walker

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In Saint-Denis, a small French village in the Dordogne, Bruno Courrèges is indeed the chief of police. He’s also the only member of the Police Municipale. This fictional village is so quiet that Bruno keeps his gun locked in a safe in his office while he works with the mayor to keep the peace. When not handling the rare parade or dealing with minor matters—the 2,900 denizens love to report each other and mislead the EU’s bureaucrats—he plays rugby and teaches tennis to the town’s children.

The village seems so idyllic, with its slow pace and everyone gathering for coffee in their café of choice, its weekly market and nicknames for everyone, that at first I thought the story must be set in the distant past. However, we learn that Bruno has been chief for ten years, after taking refuge in Saint-Denis following his service in Bosnia with the French Army as part of the UN peacekeeping force. A little addition makes the timing of the story to be shortly before the book was published in 2008.

Bruno seems to be in his thirties and full of surprises. He’s restored a shepherd’s cottage and lives there peacefully with his basset hound Gigi and a wood full of truffles. An excellent cook, he makes use of local ingredients and recipes. The descriptions of meals are simply luscious, worth rereading and salivating over. But when a peace march is disrupted by militants from the anti-immigrant National Front, Bruno’s hand-to-hand fighting skills come to the fore.

Trouble comes unexpectedly when an elderly North African man is found murdered, with a swastika carved into his chest. Bruno knows the family—he knows everyone—and learns that the old man had fought for France in the Algerian war and won the Croix de Guerre. The medal has now been stolen, presumably by the murderers.

That, along with the swastika, lead Bruno and the mayor to think at first that the culprits are Front National types. Anti-Arab sentiment is strong in the village, though most inhabitants consider their neighbors French citizens and support them when militants try to stir things up.

Whether it’s a picnic at sunset or a fight scene in the Mairi, the writing is evocative and absorbing. I especially liked the deliberate pacing of the book. Some might find it too slow, but I thought it suited Bruno’s personality and his calm, thoughtful way of dealing with problems. The solutions he finds are sometimes surprising and always entertaining. The mystery itself is interesting, with some unexpected turns and a satisfying ending.

But it’s the village that will make me pursue the rest of the series. Just as I read Louise Penny’s books mostly to return to Three Pines, I’ll be reading the rest of Walker’s series to return to the Dordogne and inspect the caves in the limestone, to feast on truffle omelets and have a petit blanc at Fauquet’s café.

Despite the murder and the long memories of WWII and the French-Algerian War, Bruno and his village are a delightful place to spend an afternoon. Even Momu, son of the victim, expresses the philosophy that “there were some problems beyond human solution, but none beyond human kindness.”

Have you read a novel recently that made you want to drop everything and go to the place where it is set?