While on tour with a stage-company, actor Paul Edwin Cole gets caught in bed with a woman by her husband. The husband beats up Paul badly enough to knock him out for fifty-eight hours and send him to the hospital; when he wakes up, Paul is a changed man. He remembers some things, like his name, but not much...It's not real amnesia, "it's just that everything sort of fades" is how Paul describes it...Westlake fashions a surprisingly compelling novel out of this fairly basic premise and simple story, managing an impressive balancing act with this material that could so easily get monotonous (or irritating) -- especially considering how long the novel is. Westlake injects some moments of tension -- encounters with the police, flashes of aggression, Paul's money trouble -- but for the most part this is a subdued novel (just as Paul is now very subdued) of a man trying to find his way, forced to tackle all those big philosophical questions -- right down to 'Who am I ?' -- in a much more direct way than most. Memory is a noir novel, centered very much on its now-loner protagonist. Paul thinks he has a mystery to investigate -- to figure out who he is -- and he goes through the detective-motions. But the pieces, even as they add up, don't help him. What he really has to do is figure out who he wants to be. Lost soul Paul sees he can't reclaim his life in New York, and he eventually makes his decision, whether to stay or go. But even in its ending, Memory remains true to the genre, existentialist noir through and through. - Reviewed in The Complete Review

Primeval and Other Times follows the inhabitants of the Polish town of Primeval in alternating chapters from 1914 to the 1980s. For as universal-feeling as the book is, its action takes place against the specific backdrop of twentieth-century Polish history...Tokarczuk’s narrative voice is firm and earthy, yet flexible enough to convey the wide range of characters with warmth and humanity. A fair one-line description of Primeval and Other Times would be: a family saga set in a sort of mythologized backwater that functions as a historical microcosm. If that sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve read Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a conspicuous influence. Following in García Márquez’s footsteps leaves Tokarczuk big shoes to fill, and, amazingly, she does, largely by virtue of her authoritative narrative voice and a skill for expertly-drawn portraiture....One of the deeply pleasing and transgressive novelties of Primeval and Other Times is its willingness to reconsider assumptions we usually make when talking about God. Is God temporary? Evil? Changing?...A book whose mission is to depict the world in its fullness, with all of its contradictions, impossibilities, and miracles, Primeval and Other Times expresses real sadness at the inability to comprehend the universe in its totality. No matter how expansive her view, Primeval still has its limits, and “he who has once seen the world’s borders will suffer his imprisonment most painfully of all.” Whatever darkness or painful truths we may encounter there, it’s a pleasure to get this glimpse into Primeval. – Reviewed in Bookslut

The Book of Fires, Jane Borodale's debut novel, belongs to a...class of historical fiction, in which the characters concern themselves with their own place and time, its daily reality, its pressing concerns, its nitty-gritty. The best period novels are of this type: take for example Anthony Burgess's A Dead Man in Deptford or Charles Palliser's The Quincunx or nearly anything by Umberto Eco. All of which is to say that The Book of Fires belongs in illustrious company. Agnes Trussel, the novel's spunky, desperate, pyromaniac protagonist, is an impressively realized character, so full of life that we can't help but identify with her humanity. She is perhaps the most convincingly rendered country-to-city transplant I've encountered recently: frightened, awestruck, employing pastoral similes to make sense of the alien metropolis. It would be easy to co-opt Agnes as a sort of proto-feminist -- spoiler alert! -- success story. But she is more than that, and less. She is a girl forced to choose the least of many, many evils, who fails, who triumphs, and who ultimately wins us over...The Book of Fires is essentially a work of entertainment, but one crafted with real heart and artistry. – Reviewed in Bookslut