An ambitious debut, City on Fire paints a portrait of New York in the 60s and 70s, following a group of people as they try to make (or unmake) their lives in the city.

The book begins during Christmas 1976/New Year 1977. It is the time of punk and there is revolution in the air. Mercer is a young black man come up from Alabama to take up a job as a teacher, hoping to break free of his family down South. His lover, William Hamilton-Sweeney, is an artist, also known as Billy Three Sticks when he played in Ex Post Facto, a punk rock band. The Hamilton-Sweeneys are among the richest families in New York, but William has broken with them, including with his beloved sister Regan. His band has been taken over by the appropriately named Nicky Chaos, who becomes obsessed by William. Sam, a young photographer, is a fan of Ex Post Facto and produces her own magazine (zine), which is part diary and part music review.  Charlie, a boy in high school, is in love with Sam and trying to come to terms with his father’s death. Richard Gosford is a veteran journalist writing a story on Sam’s father, a pyrotechnician (fireworks maker, simply put). Deputy Inspector Pulaski is investigating the shooting with which the first part of the book ends. And behind so much of the story is the master manipulator, the Demon Brother, Amory Gould—the brother of Felicia Gould, William and Regan’s stepmother—who is working slowly and surely to take over the Hamilton-Sweeney empire. Although, for me, it is the two creative spirits, Sam and William, who are at the heart of this book.

I will not try to summarize the plot: this is a sprawling book, teeming with characters and plotlines, many of which crisscross each other. The two defining moments are the shooting in the early hours of 1 January 1977 and the New York blackout in July that year. But the story ranges much wider than that: it keeps looping back in time, going over the 1960s and 1970s, stopping for “interludes”—a letter from William’s father, Richard’s article, Sam’s zines—and looping back again, with occasional glimpses into the 2000s as a “where are they now” device. The layering builds up the characters and their stories, sometimes narrating the same incident from different perspectives. This is a novel that sucks you into its world.

And the panorama is huge: from gatherings of the rich to junkies, from punk rock bands to the art world, from pyrotechnics to the corporate world, gay, straight, anarchists, corporate manipulators: you have it all. In its scope, it feels almost Dickensian, doing for New York what Dickens did for London, the city a character in its own right.

Garth Risk Hallberg writes well—some of his writing is like photography, capturing a moment in time. Regan in her father’s study: “At sunset, the south-westerly light, unobstructed by any higher building between here and the river, poured through the jewelbox windows. It has made her feel like a passenger on the Titanic: the vessel was doomed, but the memory would be extravagant.” And I love the way Hallberg describes people: Amory tries to persuade Keith, Regan’s husband, to join the family firm. “Amory’s gestures grew somewhat quantitative, like the gestures of a man trying to purchase fabric in a language he doesn’t speak. The Quanto costa gesture, the No, I couldn’t possibly, the Lachesis gesture of measuring something out to have it cut off. … Keith nodded, like a bird following a bit of waved seed.”

As a debut book, this is impressive. It really captures the 60s and 70s in New York, the social mores and what it must have felt like. The book’s weakness is that it is way too long. There were times I got a impatient with the level of detail, which is really not necessary. Pared down, it would have been a more powerful book.

“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. … My miracle was this: in all the houses of all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.”

The book is narrated by Quentin Jacobsen, a 17-year-old close to finishing high school in Orlando, Florida. Quentin is a little in love with the free-spirited girl next door. The difference between the two is demonstrated by an incident when they were children. They come across a dead man by a tree. Quentin is horrified, wants to run back and inform the adults, but Margo moves to the corpse to have a closer look. That night she climbs into Quentin’s room through the window. She has been doing a bit of detecting and tells Quentin that the man committed suicide. “Maybe all the strings inside him broke”, she says.

In high school, they drift apart. Quentin is still fascinated by Margo, but she has other friends—Becca and Lacey—and is dating a guy called Jason, while Quentin hangs out with the guys in the band, Ben and Radar. Until one night when Margo taps on his window, talks him into “borrowing” his mother’s car and takes him off on a night’s adventure. She is out for revenge and a bit of fun: Jason has been cheating on her with Becca. The night involves dead fish, paint, Vaseline, and breaking into SeaWorld in the early hours of the morning.

The next morning, Quentin cannot wait to get to school and see Margo. But she does not show up, either that day or the next. Margo has run away from home before, leaving clues to her whereabouts—she does not get on with her parents. Although her parents dismiss her disappearance as an attention-grabbing tactic, they eventually call the police.

But Margo is battling her own demons and is more fragile than any of them realize. Looking down at Orlando on that eventful night, Margo calls it a paper town: “All those paper people in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. … Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All things paper-thin and paper-frail.” In an echo of what she said about the dead man all those years ago, she says of Jason’s and Becca’s betrayal, “It was the last string. It was a lame string, for sure, but it was the only one I had left, and every paper girl needs at least one string, right?”

This image of strings being cut, leaving children adrift, runs through the book. Detective Otis Warren, who is investigating Margo’s disappearance, tells Quentin about kids like Margo: “These kids, they’re like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and they strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float away. … Once that string gets cut, kid, you can’t uncut it.”

Quentin is convinced that, this time, instead of leaving clues for her parents, she has left them for him. With a bit of help from Ben, Radar and Lacey, he tries to decipher them, and the trail leads them on a road trip in search of Margo.

The book is really about finding someone you love—not just physically but in the sense of really seeing them for who they are. Quentin only starts to see Margo as a real person after she has been gone for a while. He had idolized her for so long that he only saw the daring, larger-than-life person he had created. Everyone had their own version of Margo, and none of them encompassed the complexity of the whole person. But the search for Margo brings Quentin closer to understanding her—and himself. At the end of the book, he says: “I could see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness.”

I loved this book. I have to say I grinned through the first couple of chapters. Margo dominates the book although she is only there for a short time—she is present in her absence, so to speak. It takes you back to what it was to be 17 again, when the world was open with possibilities. John Green mixes the humour, the ups and downs of being a teenager with insights on how we relate to one another.

Loosely translated as Away on Wings, this is a story of four generations of Palestinian-Lebanese women for whom migration becomes a way of life. For the moment, it is available only in French, but there is a good chance that it will be translated into English.

The book is a fictionalized account of the lives of four women in Jadd Hilal’s family: his grandmother, Naïma, his mother, Ema, his sister, Dara, and his niece, Lila. (Disclosure: Jadd Hilal’s sister is my colleague, Zeina Hilal.) The book moves between the women, who narrate their lives. Their journeys weave back and forth over Western Asia and Europe. Through the voices of these four strong women, Hilal builds up a picture of how wars and insecurity reverberate on the lives of ordinary people.

The story begins in Haifa, the then capital of Palestine, with Naïma as a young girl. In 1937, she narrowly escapes being killed when the Haganah bomb a marketplace, and her family leave for Shefa Amr in the north. When she is 10, a young man, Jahid, comes to their house and asks for her hand, and by the time Naïma is 12, she is married.

During the civil war in Palestine in 1947, Naïma and Jahid were forced to leave Palestine, so they move to Baalbek in Lebanon—not to the historic city she had imagined, but a refugee camp on its outskirts. Jahid gets a job at UNESCO, Naima is pregnant and the growing family stays on in the city. Until they move again, this time to Damascus. Their daughter, Ema, does not want to leave (like her daughter Dara many years later). For her, airports are “places from where people leave when they stop caring… where the others, with chains of their feet, watch them”. [1]

The family move back to Lebanon. Ema goes to the University of Beirut and marries Zahi, a fellow student, to escape her father’s domination. In June 1982, the war comes to Lebanon. Ema is by now working with the ILO and Zahi with ESCWA (the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia), and they have two children, Dara and Majid. When ESCWA moves its offices from Beirut to Baghdad, the family moves too. But as soon as she can, Ema returns with her children. It is not for long. In 1983, civil war breaks out in the country, and Ema and the children have to leave again, this time for Geneva, the ILO’s headquarters. Dara does not want to leave—she sees leaving as abandonment, much like her mother did.

Dara’s years in Europe only make her more determined to return to Lebanon. At 18, she returns and marries Lotfi, a mason. For some years, she lives a simple and contented life in a village with her husband and children, Lila and Riad. Then in 2006, the Hezbollah capture Israeli soldiers and Israel retaliates with bombs. It is no longer safe, and Dara manages to escape with her children, heading back to Geneva.

Hilal’s writing is lyrical, and brings the women to life: Ema, caught between home and university, without a space to be herself. “I lead two lives,” she says, “but not one in which I feel I can breathe freely.” Dara, with a strong maternal instinct to compensate for her own mother; Lila, annoyed that she won’t be listened to until she is an adult when she has so much to say. And Naïma, dealing with the grief in her life: “I am used to pain. … Suffering becomes a shadow. It lengthens. … But it is always there, waiting for an image, a smell or a taste to show itself.”

The book ends with a sense of calm, of journeys winding down. But the new generation is getting ready to take off. Lila was a child when the bomb that killed the Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri went off. But that is not what she remembers from that day. It is seeing three birds flying out into the distance and thinking that if she closed her eyes tight she would find, on opening them:

“I will find myself flying.
“I will have the one thing that no one else has.
“I will have wings.”

[1] The translations are mine.

The 2000 elections in the US are underway. A man and his three adult sons move to New York from an unnamed city in an unnamed country. Armed with new, classical names—Julius Nero Golden and his sons Petronicus or Petya, Lucius Apuleius or Apu (a nod to his origins) and Dionysus or D.—they decide to rid themselves of any connection with their past. Or, at least Nero does, and his word is law. When asked by his youngest son what they should say when asked where they are from, Nero says, “Tell them we are snakes who shed our skin. … Say we are from nowhere or anywhere or somewhere, we are make-believe people, frauds, reinventions, shapeshifters…. Do not tell them the name of the place we left. Never speak it. Not the street, not the city, not the country. I do not want to hear those names again.”

The family settles down in the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District, or the Gardens, “a place of happy retreat from the disenchanted fearful world beyond its borders”. The book is narrated by one of their neighbours, René, a young budding film director. Through him, we get to know the Goldens: Petya, who has Aspergers and is terrified of going outside; the artistic Apu, a man about town; and D. who is going through a gender identity crisis. And Vasilisa, a beautiful young Russian woman, who comes into Nero’s life, moving in and slowly taking over, playing her game with the skill and patience of a chess master. René thinks that they would be a good subject for a mockumentary and makes it a point to get close to them. Before long, he is drawn into their make-believe narrative and their tangled lives.

But the past seeps in through the cracks, and the family starts to unravel. The place of which they never speak is India, and the unnamed city Mumbai. Ostensibly, the Goldens left because Nero’s wife was killed in the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai. The truth is a lot more complicated, as Apu finds out when he goes back looking for his roots.

The story of the family plays out against the backdrop of the twists and turns of American political life, from the Obama years to the beginning of the Trump administration. Trump is the Joker, ushering in a time when “knowledge was ignorance, up was down and the right person to hold the nuclear codes was the green-skinned red-slashed-mouthed giggler”.

Rushdie creates a rich world teeming with characters: Ubah, the Somali artist with whom both Apu and Petya fall in love; Murray Lett, an Australian hypnotist with a bouffant hairstyle who comes to help Petya deal with his fears; Riya, the young woman who helps D. figure out his identity; and U Lnu Fnu, the Burmese diplomat who lets René use his flat to access the Gardens after René moves out. I love Rushdie’s way with words. When Petya tries to go outside, he panics and ends up in a police cell. “Only Nero’s arrival in a large, grave, apologetic limousine saved the day.”

My quibbles with the book are that it takes a while to get started, and there are way too many references to film, which can get a little distracting. But it’s a great story and well worth reading.

Rushdie’s main preoccupation here is identity, whether it is D. trying to understand who he really is, Nero trying to shed his skin or Vasilisa forging a new life for herself. Or for that matter, America itself, swinging from a president who embodied certain values to another who made nonsense of them. But in the end, you cannot escape your past: it is never dead—merely dormant, waiting for an opportunity to strike. And in the case of the Goldens, that is exactly what happens.

A little-known fact about slavery in the United States is that a few black people owned slaves. In some cases, freed blacks bought their parents, spouses or children, but there were others who owned slaves for economic reasons.[1] This is the story that Edward P. Jones tells us in The Known World.

It begins with the death in 1855 of Henry Townsend, a black slave owner. Henry’s parents, Augustus and Mildred, were owned by a white landowner, William Robbins. Once Augustus had saved enough money, he bought his freedom and later Mildred’s. But Robbins was reluctant to part with Henry and kept raising the price. By the time Augustus had enough money to free Henry, he was a teenager and had absorbed some of Robbins’s ideas.

While Augustus and Mildred make a conscious decision never to own slaves, William doesn’t follow their example. Robbins takes Henry under his wing; he becomes a landowner and buys his first slave, Moses—with whom the book begins and ends—and then buys others who work in his house and on his fields. But when both owners and slaves are black—and often the owners themselves were once slaves—keeping clear boundaries between them can become a little complicated.

This is such a rich book that I am not going to summarize the plot because I would not be able to do it justice. Jones picks up on the nuances of human relations. No one here is wholly good or wholly bad. Each person comes alive and has his or her story told: Alice, a slave said to have lost her mind; Caldonia, William’s widow who now has the responsibility of running the farm; and Fern, a schoolteacher with a gambling husband. Jones narrates their lives and does it skillfully, so the book, instead of being a series of fragments, is instead a rich tapestry of life in the Southern US. The sheer number of characters means that I sometimes had trouble keeping track of them. (There is a list, but it’s at the end, so I didn’t find it until I had finished reading the book.)

From time to time, Jones pulls back for a wide-angle shot, and we see the characters as they are now and as they will be. Elias, a slave on the Townsend property, whittles a doll for his little girl, Tessie, the day Henry dies. She is told by an adult that it is not right to skip when someone has died. “Tessie would soon be six years old and being the child of her parents who she was, she listened and stopped skipping. Tessie would live to be ninety-seven years old, and the doll her father was making for her would be with her until her last hour.” Tessie was both the child and the old woman, much as we all are—the sum of our various selves at different stages in our lives.[2]

Slavery was an insidious institution and tainted all who came in contact with it, whether slave or free, or black, white or Cherokee. There is plenty here about the cruelty, repression and injustice of the period, but there is also love, understanding and attempts—sometimes successful—to break free of the chains. The book picks up the lives of those who survive and manage to go north to forge better lives.

I would recommend this book: it is beautifully written and one of the best  I’ve read this year.

[1] If you want to know more about this, read “Did Black People Own Slaves?” on The Root.

[2] Paul Auster does something similar in Winter Journal.