WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 41Review_FICTION
and Claire is shattered to learn that Naila,
because she’s indigenous, is barred from
accompanying them. Liu ratchets up the
tension that culminates in Claire’s risky
return to the islands in February 1943.
With nuanced descriptions of diverse
characters, and a wrenching portrait of the
well-meaning Durants’ limited power,
Liu upends the clichés of the white savior
narrative. This sharp take on a lesser-
known part of WWII history is worth a
look. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell. (May)
Red Dress in Black and White
Elliot Ackerman. Knopf, $26.95 (288p)
ISBN 978-0-525-52181-5
In Ackerman’s wry if convoluted latest
(after Waiting for Eden), the story of an
unhappy marriage is suffused with
pointed commentary on Turkey in the
months following the 2013 Gezi revolt.
Catherine, an American, lives in Istanbul
with her Turkish husband, Murat, a real
estate developer, and their adopted seven-
year-old son, William. Catherine and Murat
each sacrificed early artistic ambition, she
for the marriage and he for his career, and
she finds comfort in an affair with Peter, a
freewheeling American photojournalist
on a Cultural Affairs grant for a loosely
defined art project. After Catherine hatches
a plan to flee to the United States with
Peter and William, Murat intervenes
with the help of an American diplomat.
Much of the book’s action takes place on
the day Catherine tries to leave in
November 2013, interspersed with
flashbacks to pivotal moments in the
characters’ lives—Peter’s coverage of the
protests to contest the development plan
for Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park, Murat’s
complicated dependence on Istanbul’s
“reliably corrupt” government for busi-
ness, and the shocking disclosure of
William’s birth mother’s identity—that
add weight to the story of a marriage and
a city embroiled in conflict. Still, the big
reveal arrives too late and doesn’t quite
offer enough payoff to justify such dense
plotting. This falls short of Ackerman’s
best work. (May)
Wolf
Douglas A. Martin. Nightboat, $15.95 trade
paper (152p) ISBN 978-1-64362-022-0
In this disorienting yet arresting
novella, Martin (Acker) exhumes a nearly
20-year-old case in which two preteen
brothers murdered their sleeping father
with a baseball bat in Florida. Martin’s
omniscient narrator shifts between dif-
ferent points of view and time frames to
explore the father’s self-justification for
his abusive treatment and scenes of the
unnamed brothers’ trial. The boys, who
had been in and out of foster homes before
the killing, detail their father’s psycho-
logical abuse, including being subjected
to “interrogations” and locked in a cramped
room in the house, where “a face feels
crushed in.” As the boys chafe against
their father’s discipline, they spend more
time with the father’s friend, who just
might be a convicted pedophile. After the
man tells the boys they could all be friends,
the boys see a way out and begin plotting
their father’s murder. The who, what,
where, when, and why of the case gradually
come to light, but Martin is more con-
cerned with psychological impressionism
than journalistic clarity. Events aredescribed by the narrator with an eerie
vagueness that dissipates only with the
brutal slaying: “In all actuality it only takes
about five minutes to do dying.” Martin
subjects language to similar torsions,
which can occasionally frustrate or baffle,
throughout the somber tale’s unwinding.
This heartbreaking story of patricide will
move readers with its startling notes of
empathy. (May)The Prisoner’s Wife
Maggie Brookes. Berkley, $17 trade paper
(400p) ISBN 978-0-593-19775-2
Brookes takes inspiration from a British
POW’s account of his time being held by
the Nazis in this page-turning story of
love and survival. In the summer of 1944,
five British military prisoners from the
Lamsdorf POW camp arrive under guard
to assist with the harvest on a family farm in
Vražné, in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.
One of the prisoners, bombardier Bill
King, catches the eye of Izzy, the family’s★ Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.
Joyce Carol Oates, Ecco, $29.95 (800p) ISBN 978-0-06-297948-3O
ates’s quintessential examination of grief (after
Pursuit) draws on the closing lines of Walt
Whitman’s “A Clear Midnight,” which reverberate
and reappear throughout this weighty chronicle
of a family’s reckoning with the death of a father and
husband. John Earle “Whitey” McClaren, the 67-year-
old “lynchpin” of a Hudson, N.Y., family, and longtime
mayor of a nearby town, is tased, beaten, and suffers a
stroke after he intervenes during an incident of police
brutality against Azim Murthy, a stranger to Whitey
whom he registers as a “dark-skinned young man.”
Oates’s dispassionate description of the scene peels back
the layers of fear and assumption that led the police to treat Azim and Whitey so
brutally, retelling the events from Azim’s point of view. After Whitey dies, Jessalyn,
his 61-year old widow, and their five squabbling children struggle to pick up the
pieces. While Jessalyn casts about in semi-coherence—“stumbling through the
illogic of a primitive philosopher just discovering quasi-paradoxes of being,
existence, nothingness and the (limited) capacity of language to express these”—
her children fear she is approaching a nervous breakdown. More concerning to them
is the presence of Hugo Martinez, a mustachioed 59-year-old poet and their mother’s
new suitor, who recites the Whitman poem during an awkward Thanksgiving
dinner, and whom they fear will jeopardize their inheritance even as his presence has
a life-affirming affect on their mother. With precise, authoritative prose that reads
like an inquest written by a poet (“death makes of all that is familiar, unfamiliar”),
Oates keep the reader engaged throughout the sprawling narrative. This is a sig-
nificant and admirable entry in the Oates canon. (June)