Review_FICTION
WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 43Mark Haber’s fever dream of a novel, Reinhardt’s
Garden, is about the search for the secret of
melancholy (reviewed on this page).★ The Girl at the Door
Veronica Raimo, trans. from the Italian by
Stash Luczkiw. Grove/Black Cat, $16 trade
paper (240p) ISBN 978-0-8021-4734-9
In Raimo’s fanged, elliptical tale, her
English-language debut, sexual politics
roils a tranquil utopia. A philosophy pro-
fessor and his pregnant girlfriend, both
unnamed, are relative newcomers to the
island of Miden, an egalitarian society
whose “vital serenity” is in marked con-
trast to their unnamed homeland, which
is reeling from a devastating financial
collapse. When the professor’s former stu-
dent and lover declares that she had been
raped and “subjected to violence” during
their affair, the Commission investigates
the allegations to determine whether “the
Perpetrator” will be allowed to remain
within their community or whether the
“violence nesting in [him] could contami-
nate the social fabric.” The novel is told in
alternating chapters from the professor’s
and his girlfriend’s perspective as the
Commission sends out questionnaires to
their acquaintances. The professor, a
charming narcissist, finds “a wonderful
perversion” in being the center of the
denigrating administrative process, while
his isolated girlfriend reassesses the choices
that have brought her from her moribund
country to this besieged paradise. The
novel deals in shifting sentiments: between
love, revulsion, and desire; hostility toward
and identification with the accuser; and
between the couple’s ironic stance toward
Miden’s stifling contentment and their
intense yearning for inclusion in the
community. A writer of wry and lucid
prose, Raimo sculpts from these ambigu-
ities a crystalline, powerful novel. Agent:
Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (Oct.)
The Giver of Stars
Jojo Moyes. Viking/Dorman, $28 (400p)
ISBN 978-0-399-56248-8
An adventure story grounded in female
competence and mutual support, and an
obvious affection for the popular literature
of the early 20th century, give this
Depression-era novel plenty of appeal.
Alice Wright escapes her stifling English
family by marrying an American, but this
choice leads to further misery in the rural
Kentucky household of her unaffectionate
husband and his domineering father, the
owner of the local coal mine. She finds
respite in riding with the women of the
new WPA-sponsored horseback library.
She’s sustained by her friendships with
the other women, especially the brash,
self-sufficient Margery O’Hare, and the
appreciation of the isolated families she
serves. But powerful men in Baileyville
oppose the library, as it employs a black
woman, influences women and children’s
minds with fiction, encourages previously
illiterate families to defend their rights
against encroaching mining companies,
and teaches women about intimacy
through a secret copy of Married Love.
Moyes (Still Me) stereotypes her antago-
nists a bit, but provides tremendous
warmth among the librarians and centers
their perspectives thoroughly. There’s
plenty of drama, but the reader’s lasting
impression is one of love. Agent: Sheila
Crowley, Curtis Brown (U.K.). (Oct.)Suicide Woods
Benjamin Percy. Graywolf, $16 trade paper
(208p) ISBN 978-1-64445-006-2
Percy’s haunting, well-crafted prose
frequently elevates the mundanity and
isolation of being human into something
otherworldly in this genre-bending col-
lection (after The Dark Net). The brisk,
cleverly written puzzler “Suspect Zero”begins with a body found in a train car
and invites readers to follow the clues to
the killer’s identity. In the chilling “The
Cold Boy,” a man finds his young nephew
trapped beneath the ice of a frigid lake
and fears the worst, but the boy survives,
and his relief soon gives way to terror.
In the visceral, but strangely affecting
“Heart of a Bear,” an injured bear covets
a family’s humanity, leading to tragic
results. In the title story, a man employs a
disturbing experiment meant to induce a
fear of death in a group of suicidal people,
and an ember of hope burns at the heart of
“The Balloon,” which follows two lonely
survivors during the dark days of a pan-
demic. In the exceedingly creepy novella
“The Uncharted,” a risk-averse employee
of a virtual map making company joins
a dangerous rescue mission to retrieve a
team that went missing in a part of Alaska
dubbed the Bermuda Triangle of the
North. This gripping, often unnerving
collection showcases Percy’s talent as a
skilled, versatile storyteller. (Oct.)Reinhardt’s Garden
Mark Haber. Coffee House, $16.95 trade
paper (168p) ISBN 978-1-56689-562-0
Haber’s debut novel (after the collection
Deathbed Conversions) is an exhilarating
fever dream about the search for the secret
of melancholy. The story opens in 1907,
in the forests of Uruguay, as Croatian
Jacov Reinhardt searches for Emiliano
Gomez Carrasquilla, a reclusive writer
who Reinhardt believes holds the key to
understanding melancholy—an all-con-
suming emotion for Reinhardt and the
subject of a treatise he’s desperately trying
to complete. At the story’s outset, 10 men
have already died on the expedition, and
it seems to the book’s unnamed narrator,
Reinhardt’s longtime factotum, that
they’re going in circles. As the doomed
expedition plods about, the narrator slips
into his memories of Reinhardt: his cata-
loguing of different nationalities’ melan-
cholic characters (“A Russian was a
downright brilliant melancholic but was
in love with his own melancholia so that
it was sentimental and embarrassing”), his
construction of a weird castle in Stuttgart
with fake walls and trap doors, and his
relationship with a retired prostitute
named Sonja. The true pleasure of Haber’s
novel—a single paragraph—is how itFiction
Reviews © nina subin