Kirpal Singh is on his way back to Kashmir. He has just received two important pieces of news. First, he has been hired by his former boss, the governor of Kashmir, to cater his daughter’s wedding. Secondly, he has a brain tumor that will end his life in a matter of months. Watching India slide by from his second-class train seat, Kirpal reflects on the circumstances that forced him to leave Kashmir and quit the army fourteen years ago.
Kirpal never intended to join the Indian army, but his father, a decorated major, died in a plane crash on the Siachen glacier above Kashmir,
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In a rehabilitation center for torture victims in Copenhagen, Thorkild Kristensen is trying to take his patient, Bernardo Greene, into the darkest corners of his memory. Nardo is a survivor of months of torture in a Chilean prison, brutally punished for no crime other than sharing political poetry with his students. One vision kept Nardo alive during his imprisonment: he was visited by two angels who promised him that he would see the light of day again. Nardo has seen no angels since that dark day—until he sets eyes upon Michela Ibsen, a Danish woman with radiant blue eyes who frequents the same café as Nardo.
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In her latest stories, Antonya Nelson sets her characters in the middle of the country, at the edge of reason. In the title story, a depressed mother follows her delinquent son from juvenile court to the maternity ward, shocked when teenage fatherhood turns his life around. In “Party of One,” a woman tries to protect her suicidal sister from a painful breakup, while hiding a dark secret of her own. “Falsetto” also features a protective sister, who learns a lot from her adolescent brother in the wake of a tragic accident. In “People People,” a married woman discovers her own insecurities while trying to shelter her obese,
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“I need you to understand how ordinary it all was. . . .”
In the turbulent southern summer of 1963, Millwood’s white population steers clear of “Shake Rag,” the black section of town. Young Florence Forrest is one of the few who crosses the line. The daughter of a burial insurance salesman with dark secrets and the town’s “cake lady,” whose backcountry bootleg runs lead further and further away from a brutal marriage, Florence attaches herself to her grandparents’ longtime maid, Zenie Johnson. Named for Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, Zenie treats the unwanted girl as just another chore,
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Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family’s apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.
Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France’s past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl’s ordeal,
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At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.
As the townspeople grapple with their problems,
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