Review_FICTION
44 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ OCTOBER 14, 2019
The author presents several characters as
the potential killer, and though seasoned
readers may guess the culprit long before
the reveal, Mickey’s personal journey that
runs parallel to her pursuit is smartly
crafted. Filled with strong characters and
a layered plot, this will please fans of both
genre and literary fiction. (Jan.)Dear Edward
Ann Napolitano. Dial, $27 (352p) ISBN 978-1-
984854-78-0
Napolitano (A Good Hard Look) builds
a gentle but persistent tension as she
navigates the minds of passengers on a
plane that is about to crash, and the
thoughts of the boy who is the only sur-
vivor. Wonderfully detailed characters
include Edward Adler, 12 years old at the
time of the crash, who lives through the
catastrophe, and Shay, who’s the same age
and lives next to the aunt and uncle who
take over for Edward’s dead parents. The
story moves back and forth before and
after the crash, when Edward struggles to
physically and emotionally recover.
Stories of his fellow passengers are woven
throughout: Florida is a Filipina who
remembers her past lives; Benjamin is a
soldier who has just discovered he’s gay;
and Veronica is an alluring flight attendant
who tallies admiring stares. During
Edward’s recovery between 2013 and 2019,
he remembers some of these people, but
in 2016, after finding hundreds of letters
addressed to him from the families of the
victims, Edward begins to discover his
purpose. The potent prose brings readers
close to the complex emotional and psy-
chological fallout after tragedy. Edward’s
intolerable losses and his eventual brave
recovery is at first melancholy, but by the
end, readers will feel a comforting sense
of solace. Napolitano’s depiction of the
nuances of post-trauma experiences is
fearless, compassionate, and insightful.
Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group. (Jan.)Qualityland
Marc-Uwe Kling, trans. from the German by
Jamie Searle Romanelli. Grand Central, $27
(320p) ISBN 978-1-5387-3296-0
The latest from Kling (The Kangaroo
Chronicles), already in production at HBO,
is a hilarious romp through an absurd
hypercapitalist dystopia. After the third
“crisis of the century” in a decade, a countryDid your background in the visual
arts influence the novel?
At the time I started writing the book,
I was pursuing a master’s in visual arts
practices in Dublin. I was looking at
texts from Simone de Beauvoir and
Julia Kristeva and the language they
used around female experience, and
also how Irish artists like Jenny
Keane and Megan Eustace dealt with
similar language and
stereotypes visually. I
started thinking about
what all these intense
metaphors and imagery
that get ascribed to
female bodies through
psychoanalysis or horror
films. That was how I
ended up writing Ada.Can you talk about
how Ada is both
intimately connected
with yet estranged from the human
population, or her “Cures”?
I’m interested in the ethics of intimacy
and desire, and how intimacy is
something that maybe isn’t available
to everybody, or that can only look
like a particular thing for particular
people. Ada has this strange intimacy
with the Cures, where she’s inside of
their bodies (which doesn’t strike her
as unusual at all), but then the carnal
intimacy she has with Samson opens
up another way of seeing the world.Can you discuss Ada’s peculiar healing
practices?
I’ve always been drawn to how weird
practices of Western medicine are. If
you look at something like a doctor’sappointment, you get undressed in a
stranger’s room and they look inside
your body. It’s inherently bizarre, but
it’s something that we’re so accustomed
to and is built into our concept of
healing. So I wanted to think about
the violence built into very normal
types of medical treatment, which we
don’t interpret as violence because
they’ve been defined in particular ways.How did you merge the
story’s realist and fan-
tastic elements?
I think there’s something
about a strong economy
of phrase with a magic
realist slant that’s really
affecting. I suppose it’s
what the world looks like
to me: realist and gritty
but always inflected with
strangeness.What inspired the Ground, the mag-
ical patch of earth where Ada came
from?
I was in West Cork, Ireland, and the
landscape there is very dramatic.
Looking out, I became struck with
this image of a father and his
daughter digging a grave for some-
body who wasn’t dead yet. That was
an abstract moment of inspiration.
But a friend recently pointed out,
“You’ve lived your whole life in
Ireland!” We have bogs here that can
swallow and preserve bodies, which
then get found hundreds of years
later in pristine condition. That was
influencing me for sure on a subcon-
scious level.
—Matt Seidel[Q&A]
PW Talks with Sue Rainsford
Particular Intimacy
In Rainsford’s Follow Me to Ground (Scriber, Oct.; reviewed on p. 42),
a supernatural healer named Ada falls in love with a human.©^
alirainsford