David Yoon

Can I just say that I got a perverse joy every time David Bezmozgis talked of his home in Latvia thinking it as Latveria the home of Doctor Doom. Vaguely European vassals under the sway of an iron plated monarch with a penchant for villainous monologuing. Right - not helpful. God, I suck at reviewing short stories.

Listen the first, and titular, story just hooked me. It's just a tight, beautifully constructed, evocative piece about a man and his daughter buying a car door from a Somali in Toronto. And then it's followed by a couple of shaggy pieces that just don't quite gel for me and I'm off balance. But maybe I'm just not paying close enough attention. Bezmozgis has a way of laying out elements of a story that snap into sharp focus at the end. Victor returning to his homeland to settle a gravestone at the expense of his vacation resolves into dealing with his counterpart Ilya and how far removed he's become from the life that might have been his in Riga. The final story, The Russian Riviera ambles at a fine pace in a clear voice that I'd have been happy to get a full story from.

So like every short story review ever. Some hits, some misses but overall a solid piece of writing.

Alternating chapters as two lovers talk to each other, but not really. See the lady in question here is dead. Floating in limbo - sort of Patrick Swayze'ing it alongside her past lover with nary a Whoopi Goldberg medium in sight. But a lot less fun and way more wordy. These two are self indulgent and grandiloquent musers of love, wringing every bit of feeling from a distant relationship that is brought to the fore by a death.

Death allows them to be more honest in a way they never could be in life.

I've read the whole thing but I'm still not clear what happened. What exactly the scope of their love that transcends death is. They'd both moved on relationship-wise when she passed. Through their emo musings we know he was 52, hot off the heels of a second marriage when he takes a class that she, a mere 37 at the time, was teaching. We see the progression of their relationship, her career, subsequent loves, frenemies and friends, and eventually the cause of her death.

I'm confident Pedrosa could write one hell of a Dear John letter, but a novel length catalogue of a lost love seems a bit much.

A quiet little book set in Japan in the lead-up to World War 2. Taki remembers her time as a maid for the Hirai family, the wife Tokiko not much older than herself at the time. It's remembrance of a time in Tokyo - the optimism of the 2600th Anniversary and the possibility of hosting the Olympics and the creeping spectre of war played out by this small, affluent family living in a red roofed house.

It is “Mono no aware” or “the pathos of things” and the ephemeral nature of beauty as shown in an unopened letter or a tin toy.

Tokiko's husband brings in a new colleague to help with designs at the toy factory and it's clear that Itakura is smitten with Tokiko. Taki knows that a good maid is responsible for the happiness of her employer's marriage. She remembers a story told by her first master about a maid burning a document “by accident”, taking action in a way that the master never could, and could never ask for, and how that is what makes a truly great maid. Taki has her own decisions to make for the good of the household, for the sake of the marriage and reflected back from a distance of decades, what did her choice ultimately accomplish.

Adan Barrera, our fictional stand-in for Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and the former head of the Sinaloa cartel is dead. With the ruthless next generation scrambling to fill the void, Pax Sinaloa is no more. Bodies are piling up, chopped into pieces, hung from bridges, screened on social media as they are tortured and executed, or cut down in a hail of bullets as alliances are made and broken.

Meanwhile former Agent Art Keller has been appointed head of the DEA and is certain of only one thing, the war on drugs has failed. It's been a half-century of failed policy at a cost of $1 trillion for 45 million arrests that hasn't made a dent. And now the United States is seeing a resurgence in heroin usage on the heels of the opioid epidemic and the introduction of deadly fentanyl.

Winslow also weaves in stories of a 10 year old boy trying to sneak into the US on the real world “tren de la muerte”, the disappearance and subsequent massacre of 43 students that happened in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico in 2014 and of course real-estate tycoon turned reality TV star with a tenuous grasp of the English language and a love for Twitter taking the 2016 presidential election - John Dennison (a combination perhaps of John Barron and David Dennison, two pseudonyms Trump has been known to use.)

And of course the also fictional son-in-law relying on drug cartel money to finance foundering real estate investments in exchange for inside influence that goes to the very top.

It's a lot to take in and frankly should come with a trigger warning as any hint of resolution or justice feels more like artistic license and the lone bit of authorial indulgence. I suspect the reality is far worse and even less likely to be resolved.

Alfred Homer's just trying to put his past behind him. He's lost both his parents to a car accident and his lover has just left him. So he joins his parent's friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, on the hunt for information on poet John Skennen that will take them both across Southern Ontario.

And while the small towns of Schomberg, Feversham, New Tecumseth and Coulson's Hill are all actual locations in Ontario, what awaits the pair in the book is another thing altogether. They encounter towns peopled by blacks that speak only in sign language, annual house burning lotteries, ridiculous Indigenous parades, witches, werewolves and the Museum of Canadian Sexuality.

It's all a deep metaphor! It sound exhausting and self-important when I put it like that, but Days by Moonlight proves to be a dreamy odyssey propelled by Alexis' lyrical writing that glides effortlessly from one story to the next. It avoids feeling didactic and self-important in favour of a bucolic, certainly skewed but confidently Canadian road trip. All that's missing is a Timmy's double-double for the ride and roadside poutine stops.

The first half of this collection of short stories by Teresa Solana (translated by her husband) is just a hella fun smattering of crime vignettes. We've got prehistoric detectives, sunscreen wearing vampires, murderous grannies and soap opera loving ghosts. Gleefully black social satire that shifts gears for the second half. Here Solana teases the reader to make the connections across these stories. Less fantastical and instead focused on a small section of Barcelona. (I can't help but think of George from the movie Booksmart smugly pronouncing Barcelona with the spanish lisp - I imagine him cowering somewhere at the pivotal pharmacy) It's still got that playful style, satirical noir as it were, despite being anchored in the “real” world.

Ada and Evered lose their infant sister before the first snowfall. The ground is frozen solid when they lose their mother, their father tipping her out into the black winter ocean. He joins her shortly, passing before the new year. Ada and Evered are 11 and 9 and in the four opening pages find themselves completely alone on a desolate crag off the coast of Newfoundland that would come to be known as Orphan's Bay.

It's a hell of a start. The brother and sister barely eke out the winter months, awaiting salvation with the biannual visit of a supply ship called The Hope. They are replenished but refuse to leave their tiny cove and begin to set into the summer's chores.

“Their severe round with little variation but the wheel of the seasons and nothing but the slow pendulum of The Hope's appearance to mark time on a human scale.”

Against that gruelling backdrop the siblings come across a ship frozen in the ice and the horrors within, meet Captain Solomon Truss from Oxfordshire who saves their lives, John Warren and his crew from the HMS Medusa come limping into the cove after their mainmast is split in an Atlantic storm.

The kids are in good hands with Micheal Crummey, who has a poet's eye for language sprinkled with the regionalisms of his home province. It's a wondrous story inspired by a paragraph Crummey came across from an 18th century clergyman who discovered a brother and sister living in an isolated cove, the sister clearly pregnant. When he asked about their situation he was promptly shooed off the island at gunpoint. So yeah - I have to admit a bit of ick here, despite being handled well and in a way that made sense. Crummey still pulls it off.

Video review here: https://youtu.be/8Q2vg9HsLWY

Roy Othaniel Hamilton and Celestial Gloriana are educated, middle-class professional on the come-up. They've been married for a year, and like most marriages it isn't perfect - they've still got their secrets. There's work to do yet but a lifetime ahead of them to do it, filled with promise and love.

And then one night at a hotel it's a case of a black man being at the wrong place at the wrong time and Roy finds himself looking at 12 years in prison.

Celestial and Roy write each other in that time. The small cracks in their marriage growing into massive fissures pushed to breaking. The epistolary framework allows each of them to present their case uninterrupted and you find yourself sympathizing with both and neither. It's an impossible situation. Jones wrote that she felt this was a novel in conversation with the Odyssey - of a man trying to get back to his wife.

Jones has got such an ear for language, you can hear the southern black lilt in their words and sympathize with the case each of them makes. In Jones' hands I'd listen to them argue over single payer vs universal healthcare and just as likely still not know who I sided with. Complicated and messy rendered with clear eyed perspective. (But yeah, the poor tree was a bit extra.)

Thumps DreadfulWater is about as unlikely a name as you can get for a detective. He's a diabetic ex-officer turned photographer who, as the book opens, isn't sure if he's suddenly single, isn't sure if his car is a complete write-off and isn't sure what's going with his cat - who has decided to move in with a family down the road instead.

It's the fourth in Thomas King's DreadfulWater series - though you don't have to have read the previous three to jump right in. Cold case resurrecting, reality TV show, Malice Aforethought is in town to explore the suicide of the poor little rich girl who took a nose dive off a cliff years ago. Her family has always maintained that the brooding loner from the reserve, now a successful author, was responsible for her death.

When the TV show producer dies off the same cliff, in the same way, things really get interesting.

But before that we get Thumps trudging between a cast of unique characters from Stas Black Weasel, the bearlike Russian mechanic to Archimedes Kousloulas the Greek bookstore owner to Alvera Couteau the diner operator known to hold a grudge. It's a bit of local flair set to distract us from a bit of a plodding story. DreadfulWater does his best “I'm too old for this shit” but by the 20th chapter one can't help but think he doth protest too much. It's formulaic but cozy, and it give King plenty of space to judiciously leave clues for the reader. Pure comfort food.

This Giller shortlisted book opens with 23 sections, alternating between 19 year old Felicia Shaw from an undisclosed Caribbean island and Edgar Gross, an affluent, middle-aged German, heir to some vague family interest. They meet in a shared hospital room, tending to their respective mothers who are both near death.

The 23 sections represent the number of chromosome pairs found in DNA. From there the novel begins to reproduce. Part 2 jumps ahead a few years and we alternate between 4 voices times 4 to make 16 sections. Part 3 is comprised of 16x16 or 256(!) sections. The book can't keep up with this exponential growth and finally develops cancer. Super- and sub-script words insinuate themselves across the page, telling a familiar yet disjointed story. Explaining it seems altogether too much but I enjoyed the constraints Williams placed on the structure.

Williams has a poet's ear for language. He nails the privileged white guy apologist in the crosshairs of the #MeToo movement; the fast talking, big dreaming, bi-racial tween hustler working from the garage of his landlord's garage in Brampton; to the out-of-step, Portuguese, suburban, divorced dad that can't quite reconcile his long past glories with his present day indignities. Multiculturally, unapologetically Canadian.

Both slyly funny and casually devastating, it pokes at the idea of nature vs nurture, asking if we can ever hope to escape our own histories, and exploring both the family you're born into and the ones you make.

TL;DR - just watch the video review: https://youtu.be/7xQv7F8tiMQ

Back in the mid 2000's there was a small Mennonite outpost in Boliva where the women were waking up in a daze, their bedsheets soiled with blood, dirt and semen. Naturally they were dismissed as crazy, or at the very least guilty of some sort of adulterous behaviour. But the women began talking and soon it was clear it was happening to dozens of others. Demons! A plague from God! What are you going to do?

It wasn't until two men were caught breaking into a neighbours house, armed with a veterinarian spray used to anesthetize cows were the women taken seriously. The men promptly named names and 9 men were arrested.

Miriam Toews takes that as a jumping off point for her latest novel where the women in her imagined Mennonite community are faced with the return of the guilty men in 48 hours. The women are ordered to forgive the rapists lest their souls be damned to hell, and the women responsible for damning them would be judged in the eyes of God and would have to be excommunicated. The women are faced with a decision: Do Nothing, Stay and Fight, or Leave.

A timely and incredibly powerful read that explores how these women fight for the right to be heard in a patriarchal society that has essentially stacked the deck against them. Toews does an incredible job playing these ideas of justice, retribution, forgiveness and grace in the recorded conversations of the women that is by turns funny, warm, exasperating and hopeful. Hidden in a barn loft the clock is ticking and a decision must be made.

I was nervous going in. Stephenson doesn't write small, tidy books - but from the start I was happy to amble along with his big, writerly brain. I loved this near future world where the entire town of Moab is obliterated by nuclear detonation - except not really. The natural progression of fake news and internet hoaxes, this staged event predicates the dismantling of the internet. We move from there into a drastically changed country divided between the Moab truthers living in fundamental “Ameristan” where the crucifixion is the conspiracy and the law of the land is a strict interpretation of Old Testament values punishable by stoning. (though in this case automatic weapons are favoured as machines that can facilitate stoning faster and harder) Meanwhile the coastal elites employ editors to cull digital feeds and mediate information bubbles. I could happily swim around in this world for pages!

But that's just meatspace. The real action in a Stephenson novel is going to be in Bitworld. It's the Creation myth in Cyberspace and I'm on board for imaging a post meatspace world where we will find ourselves uploaded in death. But I find myself losing interest as the page count mounts. Stephenson invokes a clunky voice like some way too into it Dungeon Master and suddenly I find myself in a fantasy, sci-fi novel. There's too much Lord of the Rings in my Neuromancer. It's Christian myth, the Grail quest, and Paradise Lost with epic villains and a Pantheon of heroes and it should be awesome. But I'm not invested. In Bitworld I'm just a NPC, a servile peasant at the whim of the wealthy and their strange machinations. This post-human heaven is still the realm of the 1%'ers and I'm still caught in the middle - my life not much different regardless of who takes power. A bit grim really and maybe too on the nose for my liking.

It's the debut novel from 26 year old Fatima Farheen Mirza and the first published under Sarah Jessica Parker's SJP Imprint over at Hogarth. Mirza delivers an absolute stunner.

A Place for Us focuses on Hyderabad Muslims living in America and how they grapple within the confines of their faith and family in a post 9/11 world.

Hadia is getting married as the book opens and is hoping to see her brother Amar who has been missing for years. She is a doctor now, the eldest daughter fulfilling all the heavy expectations of a second generation child. Amar exists in opposition and has strayed from the fold. But naturally it's all a bit more complicated than that.

The story jumps back and forth in time and is told from the perspective of different family members as they recount their lives leading up to Amar's estrangement. The shifts of time and character are handled with the sure hand of someone who feels like they've been doing this for years. Seamless and assured, but I still felt the story sag in the middle. As we build to the climax, I was increasingly impatient for the inevitable collision we're clearly driving towards.

Mirza delivers and just wrecked me. Rafiq, the father is rendered with such clear-eyed understanding that belies the author's young age. Complicated, beautiful and heartfelt. It's like you're watching all the tedious brushwork at the start, sections of colour carefully laid out, but it's not until you step back from the finished canvas that you see how it comes together in a rich, nuanced tapestry that leaves you gasping.

How do you talk about a short story collection? Some work, others don't but what's clear throughout is the thoughtful effort Chiang puts to these stories. He explores notions of time travel, free will, entropy, alternate realities and wrestling with notions of being and memory.

He's careful with his logic but what I appreciate is the his exploration of the human impact. A miniature device with a negative time delay that can send a signal back a second in time creates a catastrophic existential toll on some individuals. Meanwhile a time portal allowing travel back and forth across 20 years doesn't change the past but can change our understanding of it.

You never get the sense he's overly impressed with himself and his sci-fi conceits. He doesn't fall in the trap of trying to dazzle with outlandish futuristic worlds and clever scenarios (which abound nonetheless) but instead uses these ideas as a jumping off point to wrestle with something more human.

It's an experimental prose poem, but it's so carefully structured. Dead Papa Toothwort seems a weird indulgence, the snippets of conversation he overheads curling on the page as we eavesdrop on the small village. “Pretty in a smudgy kind of way / all pumped up and shiny like a greased pig / cheers for that Ma, stout gives me the runs / jaunty little bit of topiary / godless, ferret-handling maniac / Mark smelt of rivers, we don't welcome hobbyists Malcolm.”

But Toothwort is necessary to frame the story Max Porter wants to tell. It's a fairy tale for the modern era. (And just as short) Lanny is a precocious child, his parents letting him exist in his sun-dappled world, free to let his imagination wander or they are negligent, bordering on irresponsible and even worse, opportunistic.

Chop Suey refers to the uniquely Western take on traditional Chinese food born out of necessity, a paucity of authentic ingredients, and narrow local taste palates. It's General Tso chicken, Egg Foo Young and Ginger Beef. It's what I've always referred to as fake Chinese or “Average Asian” - a guilty, delicious pleasure finished off with a fortune cookie.

In Chop Suey Nation Ann Hui, the Globe and Mail's national food reporter, along with her husband embark on an 18 day trek across Canada from Victoria BC to Fogo Island Newfoundland. Their mission? To sample small town Chinese restaurants across the country and discover the hidden DNA of these MSG-laden establishments.

With Anti-Chinese laws preventing the earliest Canadian immigrants from working in anything other than laundries and restaurants the stage was set for the proliferation of Chinese restaurants. Then the Chinese Exclusion outright banned Chinese from coming to Canada at all. When doors eventually reopened, the restaurant business was still seen as a viable way to make a living in Canada. Immigrants learned from owners and carried that knowledge to the next city - taking into consideration what worked (Chop Suey Chinese) and what didn't (traditional Chinese fare). In this way, repeated from town to town and immigrant to immigrant, did this brand of Western Chinese food take root.

This works as a great long form piece that ran in the Globe and Mail but I wished for more in book form. Still it's a warm look at the long and surprisingly Canadian tradition of Chop Suey Chinese.

A horror novel set in a prestigious MFA program with a distinct Heathers vibe is one hell of a hand sell. But I just can't resolve that this bunny coven is comprised of grad students. These squealing mean girls with their ski jump noses and peach fuzz cheeks endlessly hugging and filled with mutual adoration feel like they're pulled from CW central casting for the latest high school drama. The Plastics with literary pretensions set their eyes on outsider Samantha Heather Mackey and are determined to bring her into their Care Bear coven where horror quickly ensues.

It's grindhouse fables and ancient myth meets Alice in Wonderland by way of Riverdale High. It's shitty first drafts and killing your darlings. It starts to feel like it's comprised entirely of metaphors both literary and authorial and ends up so far up its own asshole that it needs to unzip just to be heard. The thing is bonkers sure, but I wanted more of the fun of a teen horror flick and less meta commentary about the MFA process. Still, lots of literary bingo to be had picking out the varied references scattered throughout.

I'm gob-smacked after reading this.

I mean more than the fact I ended up enjoying this story of Chungpa Han coming to the US in the 1930s from Korean with only four dollars in his pocket and a suitcase full of Shakespeare. That he portrays an America populated by immigrants; Koreans, Chinese, Italians, Russians helping each other out. That it's a sharp commentary on the “American Dream” and it reads like something that's always been a part of the canon.

And I'm floored that I've never read this before, that Amy Tan would be my first experience with an Asian-American writing about-Asian Americans. That Chang Rae Lee would be my first encounter with a Korean-American author years later. And here was Younghill Kang writing decades earlier.

And that's what absolutely kills me. Younghill Kang taught English at New York University with Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe would introduce him to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner who published his works. Kang dined with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. And while they have become part of the popular consciousness with countless movie adaptations of The Great Gatsby, pilgrimages made to the bars Hemingway wrote in, and even a movie treatment, called “Genius” telling the story of Perkins and Wolfe - Kang doesn't even warrant a footnote.

This is a huge work that deserves wider recognition. As Alexander Chee remarks in the foreword to the new Penguin Classics edition “He is one of those writers whose work has influenced you even if you've never read him.” Expand your literary canon and take in a new perspective from what should be a recognized voice in American letters. Video review here: https://youtu.be/yiEBa_RDxAo

Man is this ever a polarizing read.

On one hand it's a YA romance. Marianne is the dorky rich girl and Connell is the popular working class football star whose mom cleans Marianne's family home. If that sort of high school cliche doesn't sell you it soon slouches into NA territory. Marianne hooks up with the wrong kind of guys and Connell dates bland nice girls. Will they or won't they? We spend the entire book watching the two dance in and out of each others lives in what amounts to a Marxist romance novel. People hate this and the growing social media hype surrounding author Sally Rooney isn't exactly endearing her to serious readers.

Well screw them. All aboard the hype train!

I loved Normal People. As Rooney states, it's essentially a nineteenth century novel dressed up in contemporary clothing. Jane Austen for the social media set. Say. No. More. Marianne and Connell are recognizable types in high school but in college their status flips. Marianne is suddenly interesting and surrounded by a large coterie of friends and acquaintances while Connell feels like a milk-drinking culchie lost among the prep school kids in their plum chinos, carting around MacBooks. The two weave in and out of each others lives. Sometimes dating, sometimes just friends, and to me it never mattered whether they ended up together or not - it felt more like an examination of a pivotal four years post high school where they both wrestle with what it means to be in a relationship, grapple with depression and grief, understand their own worth and contend with the shifting power dynamics inherent with relationships. Consider me a fan.

https://youtu.be/WVTgzL9ZCj8 for more gushing over the hardest book you'd ever want to try and handsell.

Korean immigrant, trial lawyer and HBOT mom Angie Kim pens this incredible debut. Legal thriller wrapped in an incisive story of outsiders and immigrants. The lengths parent will go to for their children and the use of legal rhetoric to manipulate our sympathies. We have an explosion at the beginning of the book that kills two people but culpability is not so easily sussed out.

We jump from character to character as they slowly begin to fill in the blanks. Pak Yoo, the wild goose father who lived in a closet sized apartment in Seoul trying to save enough to join his family in America. Feeling less in a new country where language sets limits on what he might do. Emily, her life consumed with trips to countless therapy sessions, holistic organic stores and alternative treatment centers. Hours spent researching new medicines, medical advances and innovative research - everything focused on her child at the expense of her own life. Characters motivations and secrets leading to a satisfying but no less heartbreaking resolution.

Jaw dropper of a debut. Worth checking out - video review and ramblings here: https://youtu.be/WvyOeIsKUS4

As if dropped from the sky, Bertha Truitt is found unconscious in Salford Cemetery with a bag beside her containing “one abandoned corset, one small bowling ball, one slender candlepin, and, under a false bottom, fifteen pounds of gold.” She awakes and quickly gets to work building a candlepin alley in town.

OK I guess. I mean I'm intrigued but it just can't sustain me for an entire book. At the sentence level McCracken absolutely slays, her writing feels turn of the century meets Tim Burton which works in small doses. In aggregate though it can totter to what repeatedly comes up as “twee” and I simply couldn't take a full-length novel of it. I think I would have enjoyed these more as a series of jewel-like short stories instead of the accumulated mass of it all that overwhelms like a flood of molasses. (A plot point here that actually did happen in real life.)

Frustratingly I tried to invest myself in Bertha but she passes the story on to others and we jump from character to character. It's as if McCracken is determined to avoid creating any resolution for any of her characters. Knock the pins down and they get set up again for another frame.

It's a dreamy collection of short stories that have completely slipped my mind. It's only been a week or so since I've finished and they're gone. There's nothing here to latch onto - completely elusive and ephemeral. Even murder is flattened in the telling. I had to return to the book and flip through the chapters to remember each story and already they're slipping away. It's frustratingly magical how these stories refuse to leave any sort of impression on me.

I was on board for the first part of the book. Sarah and David perfectly capture the drama of highschool romance. For David love is a declaration requiring a grand gesture, but Sarah instinctively recoils at the PDA and hurts David. It just spirals from there, things escalating in their minds. Add to that the fact of them being drama nerds and its becomes altogether extra. I wanted more of this (and I'd get it shortly with Sarah Rooney's Normal People) but then Susan Choi switches gears. It's not about those two at all, she's got bigger fish to fry and that's where she lost me.

The shift in perspective wrong-footed me and suddenly I'm thrown out of the story and trying to align the pieces in my head. I've moved beyond unreliable narrator into meta unreliability and teetering at the edge of why should I care at all. And considering some of themes she's exploring that's a dangerous sentiment to hold. Some wild coincidence, another shift, and a weak stumble to the end and it just feels I've just never made the necessary connections that would reveal Susan Choi's grand design.

A collection of short stories built around the titular story originally published as a standalone novella. It's easily the strongest of the group about a 70 year old veterinarian Byeongsu living with his adopted daughter Eunhui. The thing is she's actually the daughter of Byeongsu's last two victims capping off a long killing spree. And that's just the set-up. Things get even more interesting from there with twists that play with the form and leaves you scratching your head.

It's something that carries over into the other stories as well. The twist, the subversion, the punchline in each of the stories. The final story, The Writer, veers way off the beaten track reading like a Korean Hunter S Thompson writing Naked Lunch while channelling Monty Python. It was a bit much - but again, totally unexpected.

I really enjoyed the assured translation. Krys Lee teaches creative writing at one of of South Korea's most prestigious universities and is an English language novelist in her own right. She maintains the clipped, declarative style of an originalist translation but injects a bit of writerly flourish without getting too carried away. It's just right for this surprising collection.

This got under my skin - in a good way.

Attila Asare is a Ghanaian psychiatrist visiting London to deliver a keynote presentation. He's had a career travelling from war zones to battlefields and is a noted expert in post-traumatic recovery. He's a recent widower, is also tending to a former lover who's tumbled into early dementia, and finds himself helping his niece navigate immigration issues and find her son Tano who's disappeared into the city. It's a lot, but Attila is all efficient composure, still out to attend the theatre, dine on his own or dance in his hotel room.

We're also introduced to Jean Turane in London, divorced and missing her son back in the US, designing small space gardens, and studying foxes. The two collide in a meet-cute on Waterloo bridge and Jean is soon enlisted in the search for Tano, bringing in her network of fox watchers comprised of traffic wardens, street sweepers, street performers, security guards and hotel doormen to find the lost boy.

And there's quite a bit about the foxes, coyotes and even urbanized parakeets here. How they've adapted to their ever changing situation. How they manage to thrive and how they still represent something other, something wild that needs to be tamed or eradicated before it can insinuate itself into our insulated world. We've got notes on assimilation, immigration and trauma as well as lessons in resilience and joy. How very highbrow - but at its core suffused with warmth and hope. An utterly lovely read that surprised me in the best of ways.