PERFECT BY RACHEL JOYCE

Byron Hemmings wakes to a morning that looks like any other: his school uniform draped over his wooden desk chair, his sister arguing over the breakfast cereal, the click of his mother’s heels as she crosses the kitchen. But when the three of them leave home, driving into a dense summer fog, the morning takes an unmistakable turn. In one terrible moment, something happens, something completely unexpected and at odds with life as Byron understands it. While his mother seems not to have noticed, eleven-year-old Byron understands that from now on nothing can be the same.
 
What happened and who is to blame? Over the days and weeks that follow, Byron’s perfect world is shattered. Unable to trust his parents, he confides in his best friend, James, and together they concoct a plan. . . .
 
As she did in her debut, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce has imagined bewitching characters who find their ordinary lives unexpectedly thrown into chaos, who learn that there are times when children must become parents to their parents, and who discover that in confronting the hard truths about their pasts, they will forge unexpected relationships that have profound and surprising impacts. Brimming with love, forgiveness, and redemption, Perfect will cement Rachel Joyce’s reputation as one of fiction’s brightest talents.

SOME LUCK BY JANE SMILEY

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize: a powerful, engrossing new novel—the life and times of a remarkable family over three transformative decades in America. 

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children: from Frank, the handsome, willful first born, and Joe, whose love of animals and the land sustains him, to Claire, who earns a special place in her father’s heart. 

Each chapter in Some Luck covers a single year, beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return home from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change. As the Langdons branch out from Iowa to both coasts of America, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly: one moment electricity is just beginning to power the farm, and the next a son is volunteering to fight the Nazis; later still, a girl you’d seen growing up now has a little girl of her own, and you discover that your laughter and your admiration for all these lives are mixing with tears.   

Some Luck delivers on everything we look for in a work of fiction. Taking us through cycles of births and deaths, passions and betrayals, among characters we come to know inside and out, it is a tour de force that stands wholly on its own. But it is also the first part of a dazzling epic trilogy—a literary adventure that will span a century in America: an astonishing feat of storytelling by a beloved writer at the height of her powers.

MANHUNT: THE 12 DAY CHASE FOR LINCOLN'S KILLER BY JAMES L. SWANSON

The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, led Union cavalry and detectives on a wild twelve-day chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., across the swamps of Maryland, and into the forests of Virginia, while the nation, still reeling from the just-ended Civil War, watched in horror and sadness.

James L. Swanson's Manhunt is a fascinating tale of murder, intrigue, and betrayal. A gripping hour-by-hour account told through the eyes of the hunted and the hunters, this is history as you've never read it before.

SOMEONE BY ALICE McDERMOTT

One Saturday morning, as the heroine of Alice McDermott’s quietly exquisite new novel is just developing a classic case of preteenage insolence, her mother summons her to the kitchen for a cooking lesson. It’s all in a day’s work, but the girl, Marie, takes it for granted that her mother has already done the family’s laundry and hung it out to dry. This is a book so deft that even the damp shirts and school blouses on the clothesline have some import. Marie sees them “hung upside down by their hems, their arms waving in a way that made me grow dizzy in sympathy.” 

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Jamie Schoenberger/Epic Photography

Alice McDermott 

SOMEONE

By Alice McDermott

232 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

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In this Irish-American household in Brooklyn, glimpsed at different time periods in “Someone,” Saturday washing is followed by the baking of soda bread. Marie’s mother makes it exactly the same way at the same time each week, but on this curious day there is a variation. “I’ve got to meet your father downtown,” the mother says, meaning that Marie will have to remember to take the bread out of the oven in 40 minutes. 

Left alone, and incurious about why, Marie imagines gloating over a perfect loaf when her mother comes home. But she’s distracted by the neighborhood kids, and she ruins the bread, and only years later will this episode weigh on her. The next day, mother and daughter take the father to a hospital. When Marie tries to wave goodbye to him, “it took me some time to find the right window,” Ms. McDermott writes. “And then I saw him waving to us from behind the sky’s reflection,” a place from which he will never return. 

Ms. McDermott brings supreme ease and economy to summoning young Marie’s memories in detail (why did those shirts seem to suffer?) and staying within specific time periods in Marie’s life. It is only later that the book will revisit that soda bread and link it to a sense of loss. Marie survives her father by at least 66 years, which means that this slender-looking book is filled with incident, transformed by experience, apprehensive at the constant sense of imminent loss. Ms. McDermott gives Marie the perfect job: hostess and professional mourner at a funeral parlor, where she will re-encounter dead characters who remain very much alive in her imagination. 

Seven years have elapsed since Ms. McDermott’s “After This” arrived. An abundance of work time may account for the unusual degree of symmetry that shapes “Someone,” a book that begins and ends with the same minor character, a girl who jokingly predicts her own death in a fall. Marie is only 7 then, and already sitting vigilantly on the stoop of her house, waiting for her father to come home. As she sits vigil, she sees other neighborhood figures, and she will somehow outlast them all. “I shivered and waited, little Marie,” she recalls in the novel’s opening pages. “Sole survivor, now, of that street scene. Waiting for the first sighting of my father, coming up from the subway in his hat and coat, most beloved among all those ghosts.” 

While Marie watches others so keenly, Ms. McDermott, of course, watches her. And even though her story is told episodically, in starkly nonchronological order, the timeline of her life is very clear. She learns the rules of laughter and cruelty from the community of kids in her very populous neighborhood. As a child, she sees things she will not understand until much later. 

Big Lucy, a fat girl with mental disabilities, is whisked away to an institution after she begins showing signs of adult sexuality. But Lucy is unaccountably graceful on the morning of Dora Ryan’s wedding, which is watched intently by all the local busybodies. So is Dora’s shamed appearance in the local church on the following morning, with no husband in sight. The groom turned out to be a woman in disguise, which is something that Marie, her peers and even their parents cannot understand. 

This matters to “Someone” because of the ways in which her handsome younger brother, Gabe, suffers. Gabe is an uncommonly strong, decent figure at first, stepping into his father’s role and trying to keep Marie’s teenage waywardness in check. He studies at a seminary and becomes a priest. And then, one day, he is no longer a clergyman, saying that the priesthood was not for him; he never explains much more. But one of this book’s most searing scenes describes an event at which Ms. McDermott hints long before she is ready to present it: Gabe’s breakdown, an event that has an almost biblical aspect. Because Marie is a very human “Someone,” she is not at her kindest or best when trying to understand what happened. 

The development of Marie’s sexuality, presented through only two love stories, is equally indelible. If you intend to read “Someone,” skip its jacket copy to avoid seeing what her married name turns out to be. But she has two suitors, polar opposites in moral qualities that matter and physical ones that don’t. This book’s Mr. Wrong literally leaves his mark on Marie, and winds up taking her breath away. But not in the way she had hoped. 

She goes on to have four children in a long-lasting marriage that is utterly credible in its quotidian detail. Early in the marriage, Marie goes through agonies of childbirth that are astoundingly powerful even to read about. Later, much later, the book describes Marie and her middle-aged husband’s bedtime rituals with great tenderness, at a time when glamour and flirtation are distant memories. By then, Marie bears more resemblance to her mother than she does to her own younger self. 

“Someone” is a wonderfully modest title for such a fine-tuned, beautiful book filled with so much universal experience, such haunting imagery, such urgent matters of life and death. But Ms. McDermott is plain-spoken even at her most wrenching. After Marie nearly dies, she claims to have no words for what she has been through. Her body has been “shucked,” so that “now I knew the quick work pain could make of time, of a lifetime.” With the baby healthy and the crisis past, Marie sees her mother glance at her “with sly eyes, with that secret smile about her mouth that warned against the risk of drawing too much attention to the deepest joys.” 

A version of this review appears in print on October 7, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Survivor Among A Lifetime Of Ghosts.

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Books and Literature

McDermott, Alice

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE BY ANTHONY DOERR

Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.

In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.

Doerr's gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work. 

THE PARIS ARCHITECT by CHARLES BELFOURE

Like most gentiles in Nazi-occupied Paris, architect Lucien Bernard has little empathy for the Jews. So when a wealthy industrialist offers him a large sum of money to devise secret hiding places for Jews, Lucien struggles with the choice of risking his life for a cause he doesn’t really believe in. Ultimately he can’t resist the challenge and begins designing expertly concealed hiding spaces—behind a painting, within a column, or inside a drainpipe—detecting possibilities invisible to the average eye. But when one of his clever hiding spaces fails horribly and the immense suffering of Jews becomes incredibly personal, he can no longer deny reality.

LEAVING TIME BY JODI PICOULT

Book review: ‘Leaving Time’ by Jodi Picoult

The enigmatic elephant — a favorite of writers from Sara Gruen to Rudyard Kipling — has lumbered its way into bestselling author Jodi Picoult’s new novel, an entertaining tale about parental love, friendship, loss — and, well, elephants.

“Leaving Time” is set partially at a New England elephant sanctuary and in the savannas of Africa, where herds of wild elephants roam. When the novel opens, 13-year-old Jenna Metcalf is searching for her mother, Alice, an elephant researcher, who disappeared 10 years earlier in the wake of a tragic accident at the sanctuary. In hopes of finding clues to her whereabouts, Jenna mines detailed journals her mother kept about her work. It’s a lonesome quest: Her father has been in a psychiatric hospital since the incident and her grandmother, who has been taking care of Jenna, doesn’t “want to go there,” Jenna informs us. So Jenna solicits the help of Serenity Jones, a disgraced medium, and Virgil Stanhope, a hard-drinking private detective.

Jenna is particularly tormented by her inability to remember details of the night her mother disappeared. There’s an irony, of course, that the wise teen Jenna is quick to point out: “You know the old adage that elephants never forget?” That truism is based in fact, Jenna explains, and her mother’s research proved it. Another area of her mother’s research — elephant grief — also resonates clearly in a personal way. When an elephant calf dies, its mother often refuses to leave her offspring’s body for days. Jenna knows that passage from her mom’s journal by heart. “Sometimes,” she says, “when I am bored in class, I even write it in my own notebook, trying to replicate the loops of her handwriting.”

Such poignant moments are often flecked with Jenna’s authentic-sounding teen voice. “Let’s talk for just a second about the fact that my grandmother is going to ground me until I’m, oh, sixty,” she tells us about her decision to skip town in pursuit of her mom. “I left her a note, but I’ve purposely turned off my phone because I don’t really want to hear her reaction when she finds it.”

Unfortunately, though, Jenna’s witty voice is interspersed with passages narrated by less engaging characters. Alice in particular comes across as clinical, and the entries from her journal, though informative, occasionally read like a zoology textbook, while the rest of novel is a melting pot of genres including mystery, romance and the supernatural.

”Leaving Time” by Jodi Picoult. (Ballantine)

Picoult mostly manages to blend all of these diverse elements into a cohesive whole, wrapping up her tale with an ending so surprising that she has asked reviewers not to reveal spoilers on social media. Suffice it to say that readers of “Leaving Time” are unlikely to forget these formidable animals that are so different from us in appearance but so similar when it comes to saying goodbye to those they love.

Gillespie is a novelist and teaches writing at Georgia Regents University.

LEAVING TIME

By Jodi Picoult

Ballantine. 405 pp. $28