WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 59Review_FICTION
now elderly murderer 33 years later. Ryna
and her husband Pich’s middle daughter,
Nita, has her dreams of finishing school
scuttled by her father’s insistence she
marry wealthy, inattentive Mr. Noth. In
a moving story, Kamal, Ryna and Pich’s
only son, attempts to talk to his crush
Sophea despite rumors she is a prostitute.
The oldest daughter, Thida, moves to
Phnom Penh to work in a garment factory
to support her family after several bad
harvests but is taken to a brothel by a
cousin, who claims her father sold her.
Lightman avoids voyeuristic exploitation
in the ensuing tragedies. A bicycle-stealing,
teenaged Pich, dodging conscription in
1973, is visited by his grandmother’s
ghost before his scheme collapses. The
youngest daughter, pensive Sreypov,
finally cracks through her father’s
authoritarian rule by marshalling family
support for her refusal of an arranged
marriage. Lightman infuses Cambodian
culture naturally among his considered
dissections of pain. Readers will be
moved by this collection’s navigation of
deeply personal heartaches and lingering
implications of war. Agent: Deborah
Schneider, Gelfman-Schneider Literary
Agents. (Sept.)off jogging, trying to escape her own guilt.
India Calder, a woman about Hannah’s
age, shows up at the gift shop one day and
becomes determined to help Hannah. It’s
what India does; when she senses someone
is troubled, she helps them and then moves
on. Hannah is resistant, but India is persis-
tent, pointing out that they’re both
Australians temporarily living in London,
and a friendship develops. The question
becomes not whether one can help the
other, but whether both can find a way to
heal the secret each is hiding. It’s difficult
to decide which of the two vibrantly
described personalities is more impulsive
or more secretive. Dynamic prose makes
the pages turn and then subsequently fly
by when twists arise. Moriarty’s novel is
both fast-paced and immersive. (Sept.)Three Flames
Alan Lightman. Counterpoint, $25 (208p)
ISBN 978-1-64009-228-0
Lightman (Einstein’s Dreams) portrays a
Cambodian family’s conflicts with precision
in this affecting novel told from the per-
spectives of six characters. In 2012, Ryna,
a mother who has struggled with her
father’s death during the Khmer Rouge
regime, feels her hesitant impulse for
revenge crumble after seeing her father’sboth her and Fah over the edge, in different
ways. Fah’s fevered dream sequences—
which involve bloody pajama pants,
mermaids who have seen better days, and a
reoccurring copy of the magazine Yogalife—
are highlights. Slim and ferocious,
Masłowska’s novel is a wild trip from
beginning to end. (Sept.)
The Grammarians
Cathleen Schine. FSG/Crichton, $26 (272p)
ISBN 978-0-374-28011-6
Schine’s sparkling latest (following They
May Not Mean to, but They Do) has a prickly
underside that keeps it anchored to the
daily stresses of family life. The tale of
identical twins follows word-drunk Laurel
and Daphne from their infancy, when they
develop a language of their own, into a
childhood in the 1960s during which they
become obsessed with reading the dic-
tionary, on through their diverging paths
as a poet and a grammar columnist, and
into an old age in which their differing
attitudes toward words tear them apart.
Along the way, they baffle their parents,
frighten their psychiatrist uncle Don, and
intrigue their cousin Brian. Eventually,
each marries a mild, tolerant man, leaving
the husbands to become easier friends than
their high-strung wives. Both a fizzy
exploration of the difficulties of separating
from one’s closest ally and a quirky
meditation on the limits of language for
understanding the world, the novel moves
slowly through the first couple decades of
the twins’ lives and then more briskly
through the rest. Though the work is
deliberately paced, the affectionate ten-
sion between the twins provides enough
conflict for a lifetime. This coolly observant
novel should please those who share the
twins’ obsession with slippery language.
(Sept.)
Paper Chains
Nicola Moriarty. Morrow, $15.99 trade paper
(336p) ISBN 978-0-06-241354-3
The lives of two women intersect in
Moriarty’s heart-tugging story (following
Those Other Women) of confronting ques-
tionable choices. Twenty-eight-year-old
Australian Hannah Privitelli has moved
to London and is working at a museum
gift shop. She believes she has made a cruel
decision that has destroyed her life, and
aside from work, she spends her only day
★ The Shadow King
Maaza Mengiste. Norton, $26.95 (448p) ISBN 978-0-393-08356-9M
engiste (Beneath the Lion’s Gaze) again brings heart
and authenticity to a slice of Ethiopian history,
this time focusing on the Italian invasion of her
birth country in 1935. While Hirut, a servant
girl, and her trajectory to becoming a fierce soldier
defending her country are the nexus of the story, the
author elucidates the landscape of war by focusing on
individuals—offering the viewpoints (among others) of
Carlo Fucelli, a sadistic colonel in Mussolini’s army; Ettore
Navarra, a Jewish Venetian photographer/soldier tasked
with documenting war atrocities; and Haile Selassie, the
emperor bearing the weight of his country’s devastation
at the hand of the Italians. In Hirut, Mengiste depicts both a servant girl’s low status
and the ferocity of her spirit—inspired by the author’s great-grandmother who sued
her father for his gun so she could enlist in the Ethiopian army—which allows her
to survive betrayal by the married couple she serves and her eventual imprisonment
by Fucelli, captured with horrifying detail by Navarra’s camera. Mengiste breaks
new ground in this evocative, mesmerizing account of the role of women during
wartime—not just as caregivers, but as bold warriors defending their country. (Sept.)