After This
ALICE MCDERMOTT
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24
National Book Award-winning novelist Alice McDermott returns to her perennial themes of memory, family and forgiveness in this tale about how the '60s tore a hole in one family's life. She brings to life the Keanes, an everyday clan of Irish-Americans on Long Island who lose a son to Vietnam, firmly establishing a before and after date in their lives. As in Anne Tyler's best fiction, what happens is less important than how McDermott registers its impact on her characters' interior worlds. She observes painstakingly the reactions of John and Mary Keane as their daughter flees to London and their other children spiral out of their orbit. It is a heartbreaking story, its power drawn from how vividly McDermott renders the recent past and then manages to make it feel like our own.
Half of a Yellow Sun
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
Knopf, $24.95
Set in the secessionist republic of Biafra in the 1960s, this powerful novel captures a nation's swift plummet from great expectations to the privations of war. The narrator for this plunge is a 13-year-old houseboy, Ugwu, through whom Adichie conjures a diverse cast of characters: Odenigbo, a well-to-do math professor; Olanna, his London-educated mistress; and Kaienne, Olanna's twin sister, who dates Richard, a British man who has come to Nigeria to write about Igbo art. When war breaks out, their intertwined fates briefly collapse into one before taking varying turns for the worse. Olanna descends into poverty and near-starvation; Ugwu is conscripted to war. Richard gives up on the book he intended to write. As the civil war rages, the world looks on, refusing to acknowledge either the new nation's sovereignty or its suffering. Adichie, who was born in 1977, is too young to have lived through this tumultuous period, but she recreates it movingly in language that is beautiful and precise.