REVIEWS

special issue: best books of 2021 fiction

THE ARSONISTS’ CITY

Alyan, Hala Mariner Books (464 pp.) $26.00 | March 9, 2021 978-0-358-12655-3

Alyan’s riveting novel, set in America and the Middle East, brims with overlapping memories of secrets, betrayals, and loyalties within a seemingly assimilated Syrian Lebanese American family. In 1978, young Palestinian Zakaria is assassinated in a refugee camp in Beirut, the victim of a factional revenge killing during Lebanon’s civil war. Weeks before, Zakaria had betrayed his best friend, Lebanese Idris, with Idris’ Syrian girlfriend, Mazna. Spelled out in the first pages, these facts will haunt the novel as their impact on members of the Nasr family comes to light. Cut to present-day California, where cardiac surgeon Idris Nasr lives with Mazna, whom he married not long after Zakaria’s death. Their three grown children, born and raised in America, take their parents’ perpetually rocky 40-year marriage for granted. And as they first avoid, then succumb to Mazna’s entreaties to convene in Beirut—supposedly to hold a memorial service for Idris’ recently deceased father but really to protest against Idris’ selling the ancestral home he’s just inherited—all three are hiding problems from their parents. In Brooklyn, almost 40-year-old microbiologist Ava suspects her WASP husband is having an affair; in Austin, Mimi, 32, has cheated on his long-suffering girlfriend and been dumped by the band he started; almost 30-year-old Naj, an internationally famous singer/musician, has yet to tell her parents she’s gay. Meanwhile, Mazna, whose passions for Zakaria and her aborted career as an actress have never died, has spent her marriage betraying and being betrayed by Idris, depending upon yet resenting him. And Idris, a man of privileged self-importance and some charm, is perhaps more self-aware than his family realizes. Palestinian American psychologist and writer Alyan is masterful at clarifying the complicated sociopolitical realities surrounding Lebanon’s and Syria’s intertwined histories in terms of class, caste, colonialism, and tribalism. But even more masterful here—as in Salt Houses (2017), which portrayed the Palestinian diaspora through four generations of a single family—is her laserlike focus on her multifaceted characters in big and small moments that come together to create a singular family.

Painful and joyous, sad and funny—impossible to put down.

LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS

Aoki, Ryka Tor (384 pp.) $25.99 | Sept. 28, 2021 978-1-250-78906-8

A runaway trans girl, a harvester of souls for hell, and a family of refugee alien doughnut makers collide in unexpected and wondrous ways. Katrina Nguyen is on the run. She’s escaped her violent father and come to crash in Los Angeles with a queer friend, except now that she’s actually here, he’s not exactly as welcoming as she’d hoped. But she’s got her laptop, her hormones, and her violin—everything she needs for now. Shizuka Satomi is looking for her next student. The world knows her as a legendary violin teacher, sometimes called the Queen of Hell. What no one knows is that she’s had 49 years to actually deliver seven souls to hell. Now her time is almost up, and she wants her last soul to be someone special. Lan Tran and her family run Starrgate Donut, but they too have a secret: Their doughnuts are replicated, not baked, and they are alien refugees from a galactic war. Used to rejection and hatred, Katrina can’t bring herself to trust the offer of private violin lessons from a striking stranger. But as her life gradually begins to intertwine with the lives of Shizuka, Lan, and other colorful, well-drawn characters, everyone receives unexpected gifts of tenderness. Musicians selling their souls to hell shouldn’t fit in the same story as alien doughnut makers building a stargate, but somehow all these elements combine to create something wild and beautiful.

Filled with mouthwatering descriptions of food and heart-swelling meditations on music, this novel is an unexpected gift.

FOREGONE

Banks, Russell Ecco/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $28.99 | March 2, 2021 978-0-06-303675-8

A man nearing death tries to tell his wife certain things about himself in this dark, affecting work.

Leo Fife, a documentary filmmaker and teacher, sits in a wheelchair at home with a morphine drip and a bladder bag,

dying of cancer at 77. For most of one day, April 1, 2018, he’s on the other side of the camera as former students want to record him explaining how he made his famous films. Leo has other plans, namely to reveal to his wife of more than 35 years facts about himself, tapping into “a tsunami of memories.” They include dropping out of college with plans to fight for Castro, divorce, drinking with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, betraying a longtime artist friend, and his real Vietnam War draft status. The novel’s structure, which alternates two very different narrative segments, seems awkward at first and then strikingly effective. There are the bare, Beckett-like present-day sections in which Leo as talking head delivers his tale to the camera under one spotlight and chats testily with those in the room. Longer, time-hopping sections present Leo’s past in a less-flattering light than his public persona enjoyed. It can be hard to know what’s true in any of this, for Leo is a highly unreliable narrator given his illness, his medications, his own doubts about his memory, and the challenges his story elicits from the former students, who regard him as hero and mentor, as well as from an unexpected source. Banks, who turned 80 this year, explores aging, memory, and reputation in thoughtful and touching ways, enhanced by the correspondence between aspects of Leo’s life and the writer’s own history. At one point a character says, “It’s like trying to tie a novel to the author’s real life.” Maybe setting the story on April Fools’ Day is the broadest nod to such delusive links and to the deceits and truths of creativity.

A challenging, risk-taking work marked by a wry and compassionate intelligence.

NORTHERN SPY

Berry, Flynn Viking (288 pp.) $26.00 | April 6, 2021 978-0-73-522499-5

Berry delivers a taut and compassionate thriller as young mother Tessa is drawn into working as a double agent in the Irish Republican Army to protect her sister. It’s been years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed, but tensions in Northern Ireland remain at a constant simmer. Tessa moves through the simple motions of her life: taking care of her infant son, working at the BBC News Belfast bureau, spending time with her mother and sister. The physical isolation and beauty of her home village hint at the possibility of a world in which one doesn’t always have to be alert for terrorists; Tessa is old enough, however, to remember the Troubles, and she fears that the IRA will never truly surrender. Still, it comes as a shock at work one day when she sees a video of her sister participating in an IRA robbery. But even more shocking is the revelation that comes from Marian herself once she is able to reach out to Tessa: She’s been a member of the IRA for seven years, drawn in by their talk about economic inequality, and has recently begun feeding information to MI5 in order to create space for peace talks. After a bomb she created for the IRA failed to blow up, though, she’s under constant surveillance and can no longer meet with her British handler. And so Tessa joins her sister as a double agent: She’s accepted by Marian’s crew and asked to do increasingly dangerous tasks for the IRA, which she then reports to her handler. Days of espionage are balanced by quiet moments with her son as Tessa comes to realize that putting herself in danger is justified, even necessary, if she wants him to grow up in a safer Ireland. Berry’s use of short chapters, often divided into several smaller episodes, is particularly effective in reflecting Tessa’s fragmented sense of loyalty and safety. This is not a book of action, though there is plenty, but instead a greater reflection on personal choice and consequence.

A poignant and lyrical novel that asks what is worth sacrificing for peace—and provides some answers.

DESTROYER OF LIGHT

Brissett, Jennifer Marie Tor (304 pp.) $22.99 | Oct. 12, 2021 978-1-250-26865-5

The myth of Hades’ abduction of Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, inspires a dark, poetic tale of struggling human colonists and ambiguously motivated aliens on a distant planet. In Brissett’s short novel Elysium (2014), overlapping narratives chronicled the invasion of Earth by the krestge, hostile and inscrutable multidimensional beings who poisoned our world and murdered or mutated most of humanity. The survivors embarked on a centurieslong journey to the planet Eleusis only to be followed there by the krestge, now offering peace. Deidra, genetically modified to encourage the growth of kremer, a protein-loaded grain vital to the settlers, loses her daughter, Cora, to the marauding rebel army of Dr. Aidoneus Okoni. Okoni vehemently distrusts the krestge’s intentions and plans to weaponize the girl’s unique power to shift into another dimension against them. Years later, Cora (renamed Stefonie and now unhappily married to Okoni) is unexpectedly let loose in the city of Oros to carry out the final phase of his plan. Will Stefonie remain faithful to the mysterious orders given by her abusive, unstable husband, or will she make a break for freedom? Is going home even possible for her? Meanwhile, twin investigators bound by a strong psychic link search for a missing boy whose parents—one human, one krestge—are clearly not saying all they know about his disappearance. Skipping back and forth across the timeline of the story, Brissett uses the alien setting to explore contemporary issues, including racism (the gifted are feared and despised; some attempt to “pass” by obscuring the glowing irises that indicate their psychic talents), the complexities of allyship, and the trauma experienced by child soldiers. The author’s updated take on a classic myth is both clever and entertaining, particularly in her placement of Hecate, goddess of the crossroads, as the sentient interface to the Lattice, the planetary internet and