SMALL WORLD by Jonathan Evison

finds out that her father, Aristotle Kostas, who just had a stroke, has left the hospital and jetted off to Athens without his medication, Gia decides her only option is to follow him. Thus she sets off on an adventure, armed with just enough Greek to apologize for not speaking Greek. When Gia arrives in Greece she quickly realizes she does not want to return to her normal life but instead decides to follow her professor father on his quest to retrace Odysseus’ route home from Troy. Furthermore, she successfully pitches a series of food articles documenting her Mediterranean sojourn to NOSH. But things become more complicated after Gia, thinking Anthony has ended their relationship, sleeps with a man who turns out to be her father’s colleague. The author’s Achilles’ heel is spending too much time on ridiculous plot points (long lost siblings! near-death brushes with squid!) and not enough time developing the relationship between Gia and her father. But if you’re willing to suspend disbelief long enough to overlook these twists and turns, the delicious descriptions of Mediterranean food and scenery are enough to keep you hooked.

A mouthwatering voyage.

SMALL WORLD

Evison, Jonathan Dutton (480 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 11, 2022 978-0-593-18412-7

A train accident reveals the connections among a host of people across race, class, history, and the country in this ambitious epic. Evison’s seventh novel opens by giving away the climax: Walter, a train operator working his final run for Amtrak, is at the center of a wreck on the way to Seattle. But despite making the worlds-in-collision setup clear early, Evison has still crafted a suspenseful novel, as he shuttles between the train’s riders in 2019 and their forebears in the 1850s. Walter is a descendent of Nora and Finn, Irish twins orphaned in Chicago. Malik, a rising high school basketball star, is a descendent of George, an escaped slave. Jenny, a hard-charging corporate fixer (she supervised Amtrak buyouts that, it’s implied, led to the crash), descends from Wu Chen, a Chinese immigrant