Sing to Me
by Jesse Browner
Ever since their exploits were recorded in Homeric Greek, the warriors of the “Iliad” have been fixtures of our cultural heritage. But in his latest novel, Browner prefers to focus on the unknown lives that were lost on the fringes of the Trojan War, on the damage years of fighting left behind. SING TO ME (Little, Brown, 213 pp., $28) takes place in an apocalyptic landscape of scorched fields and abandoned villages. Its hero is an 11-year-old boy who finds himself alone on the family farm with only a donkey for company.
Setting off in search of his father and 6-year-old sister, long overdue after a desperate trek to the markets of the nearby city, Hani heads for “the road everyone takes before they don’t come back.” What he finds at its end is a vast smoldering ruin, abandoned by both its defenders and its attackers — except for one severely wounded Greek. An innocent confronted with unspeakable destruction, Hani struggles to understand what the future holds and what his place in it might look like. “Now,” he thinks to himself, “the only combatants left are a dying soldier and a boy with a sling. Is this what people mean when they talk about peace? Maybe peace is just war taking a rest.”
The Rarest Fruit
by Gaëlle Bélem
The island of Réunion, a French territory off the east coast of Africa, is known for its vanilla. Less well known is the story of the illiterate enslaved boy who figured out how to hand-pollinate vanilla orchids, allowing the wider world to experience a flavor that had been lost since the 16th century, when the Aztec empire was destroyed by the Spanish.
Edmond Albius made his discovery in 1841, when he was only 12 years old. It was, as Bélem notes in THE RAREST FRUIT (Europa, 189 pp., $24), just one act in the “tragicomedy” of a Black child adopted, then exploited, abandoned and finally rescued in adulthood by the white planter whose horticultural knowledge he absorbed without benefit of formal schooling. Told he must be content with toiling as a gardener rather than studying to be a botanist, Edmond “makes do with what he has and what people deign to give him.”
Translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle, Bélem’s fictional account of Edmond’s experiences is also an ironic portrait of a society in which the official abolition of slavery does little to improve the lives of the formerly enslaved: “They were running toward freedom as if plowing headlong into a wall, Edmond first among them.”
33 Place Brugmann
by Alice Austen
An apartment building in World War II-era Brussels gives Austen’s 33 PLACE BRUGMANN (Grove, 343 pp., $28) its title, but the activities of its residents take the novel’s action as far as the Outer Hebrides and the salons of Paris. Half a dozen characters share their perspectives with the reader, although pride of place is given to Charlotte Sauvin, an aspiring artist who lives with her widowed architect father in 4L.
Unlike a few of her neighbors — the Jewish family who escape to England before the Nazi occupation, the Russian seamstress who follows her lover to France — Charlotte remains in her native city. Married in secret to a Jew who has fled to join the Resistance, suspicious of nosy Miss Hobert in 3R and possibly collaborationist Dirk DeBaerre in 2R, Charlotte is aware that the war will inevitably arrive on her doorstep, then push its way inside. “Just as you got used to one thing, there was another. It was always happening to someone else, until it wasn’t, and by then it was too late.”
The Eights
by Joanna Miller
In October 1920, Oxford officially admitted its first class of female undergraduates. Inspired by what was at the time a highly controversial change, Miller uses THE EIGHTS (Putnam, 369 pp., $29) to invent stories (and back stories) for four of these young women, who’ve been given their group nickname because they occupy adjacent rooms on Corridor Eight of St. Hugh’s College.
Beatrice is the ungainly daughter of a famous suffragist, Marianne a painfully shy vicar’s daughter. Dora comes from very new money, Ottoline from the old, entitled upper class. Initially uncertain about one another — not to mention how to navigate a highly restrictive, often humiliating code of conduct seemingly designed to protect Oxford’s reputation more than their own — they quickly settle into an unlikely but satisfying camaraderie.
Another link is “the immutable legacy” of the Great War, which makes Beatrice wonder if “her generation will always expect the worst of any situation.” Dora has lost her beloved brother and her fiancé, both of whom would have had places at the university. Ottoline (who prefers to be called Otto) is trying to squelch awful memories of her stints as a nurse and driver in London, while Marianne is hiding her own wartime secrets. As they embark on their scholarly careers, they’re “making history in a world where,” as Dora puts it, “there has surely been enough history made already.”
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