I’ve been struggling to write this review for Chimamanda Ngozi’ Adichie’s newest novel Americanah for over a month now. It’s simply because I found it so stunning, I can’t adequately describe why. At its essence, it’s a story about belonging or not belonging. While her prior novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, was set only in Nigeria, this one includes America and England as well.

Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love as high school classmates in Lagos. It’s no teenage infatuation, but a relationship with lasting consequences. Ifemelu earns a scholarship in America, while Obinze works at getting a visa to join her. He’s denied entry to the US, but manages to illegally get to London. She finds herself unable to find steady work and descends into a deep depression as she succumbs to a desperate act for money. Later she finds work as a nanny to a sympathetic rich family, while writing a blog about being black in America. She incisively writes about racism and sexism, detailing the expensive and lengthy procedure of relaxing kinky African hair to conform to cultural standards.

After some failed relationships, Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, finding an equally bewildering society with a ballooning economy and a nouveau riche class. Here she and Obinze circle each other, the teenage love not at all having abated over the years.

While the love story is central to the novel, Adichie also deftly navigates the ideas of belonging and identity, in countries and in people. The stories of Ifemelu and Obinze are told so well, and Adichie’s overarching ideas never overtake the glorious writing. It’s her best book yet.

[Ed. note: The author will be appearing at Harvard Book Store on May 22nd at 7 pm. She’s such a pleasant author to meet, so if you live in the area, you should come.]

The cover of the ARC for Queen’s Gambit features a quote from The Bookseller which says, “What Hilary Mantel fans should read while waiting for the final part of her trilogy.” While Fremantle’s writing lacks Mantel’s language play and depth, they’re not terribly far off. She tells the story of Katherine Parr, otherwise known as Henry VIII’s sixth wife.

The book begins when Katherine’s elderly second husband dies in 1543. The point of view moves around between Katherine and various people around her, including her close friend Huicke, a doctor, and Dot, her maidservant. It spans her marriage to Henry, his death, and her eventual marriage to Thomas Seymour. The court intrigue, the king’s ego, and Katherine’s wits create a compelling story. Fremantle did much research for this book and even though we know the outcome, she builds enough suspense to keep you guessing. This is a strong, great read for a debut.

I loved Steve Amsterdam’s linked dystopian short story collect Things We Didn’t See Coming for it’s inventiveness. In his new book, What the Family Needed, Amsterdam tells the story of a family over 30 years again through linked short stories. As each family member faces a crisis, they discover that they’ve gained some sort of superhero power that helps them get through it. It sounds silly, but in Amsterdam’s hands, it appears natural, as part of the person’s inevitable growth. While every chapter is not as strong as others, I found myself moved by the family’s travails and quite engaging.

Dennis Lehane has his own imprint of novels now, and Ivy Pochoda’s Visitation Street is the first I’ve read. The introductory note on the ARC says that when he picked up the manuscript, he looked for a reason to reject it, and found a good book. I’m kind of embarrassed to just echo what he said, but he’s right.

As a gritty urban novel full of morally ambiguous characters, it’s a great fit for Lehane’s brand. But it’s also a great fit because it’s better than average.

The book itself: Two teenage girls sneak out one night in Red Hook. One is found alive the next morning by a Catholic-school music teacher. The other is missing. Nobody is entirely innocent. Nobody is entirely guilty.

Hipsters, hustlers, firefighters, longshoremen, shopkeepers, drunks, junkies… everyone in the neighborhood is doing somewhat less than their best, and everyone’s implicated in some moral or criminal failing. Some of those failings are tied to the poor missing girl. Some are not. Some are somewhere in the middle.

Visitation Street is a tender but unsparing portrait of contemporary Brooklyn and of a sort of universally flawed humanity that I think all its readers can relate to. It’s a perfect fit for Lehane’s new imprint, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

My parents recently sent me a copy of a book they’d both read and loved: Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis. The title alludes to the battle of Salamis, a key turning point in the Greco-Persian war, while the book itself focuses on a rather less decisive moment in Spanish history on its way to grappling with the peculiarly mixed legacy of Franco and his dictatorship in contemporary Spain.

In case you don’t remember, the usual narrative of the Spanish Civil War is that the good and idealistic Republican forces lost out to the brutalities of the Falange, but fortunately after Franco’s death Spain returned to being a more free society. However, the more we learn about what actually went down, the more it seems that there was no side of angels. The Republicans probably had better arts and literature, but there were plenty of poets, even good ones, on the fascist side. The Republican forces slaughtered priests and suspected collaborators just as readily as the Nationalists slaughtered communists and dissidents. (To be clear, the fascist dictatorship was definitely bad. It’s just that the alternative would likely have been a similar stretch of terrible communist-affiliated dictatorship rather than a beacon of freedom and democracy).

Nothing is simple, in other words, especially with the civil war and the dictatorship still in the very recent past. That’s why we get a novel like this one.

The narrator is a moderately successful journalist and failed novelist, who winds up researching and writing a nonfiction book about a single odd incident toward the end of the Civil War. One of the intellectual forbears of the Falange is in a prisoner of war camp; as his captors evacuate and flee, they plan to kill all the prisoners. By chance, this one escapes. A soldier finds him hiding in a ditch, but lets him go anyway. Post-war, the escaped prisoner is lauded as a hero by Franco, gets a ministry position, pulls strings to help dissidents go free, and then lives out his years as an increasingly irrelevant figure in the national political discourse. The Republican executioner who found him and let him go remains anonymous.

The narrator despises fascists reflexively but finds himself drawn to this particular character and the people who surrounded him, some of whom are still alive. Each interview and archival visit clarifies some parts of the story and obscures others, and the reader is left to untangle layer upon layer of historical confusion.

It’s a striking contrast with the historical novels of Hillary Mantel. She also covers confused and contentious historical territory, but she does it in a single frame: She picks a narrative and carries the reader along. Her prefaces acknowledge that historical interpretations are imprecise, and that in the interest of the tale she’s chosen the ones that she feels best.

Cercas doesn’t do that at all. With Soldiers of Salamis he has written a novel about the writing of a nonfiction book about historical incidents, in which nobody is quite as noble or as evil or as anything as anyone wants or thinks. So we have a temporal, emotional, and political muddle of frequently terrible ideals mediated mostly by their incompetent or inconsistent application. That muddle is framed and reframed and reframed again inside different stories and perspectives. It’s exhausting, but it’s also a pretty good reflection of the way the world works.

I talked with my parents about it over email and their comments are pretty insightful, so I’ll just quote them here. My father says he “found the multiple layers of narrator (novelist, journalist, horny loser, historical novel, history) somewhat frustrating while I was reading it, but in retrospect it added a lot of depth.” My mother says she really appreciated “the way Cercas allows us to see the aleatory nature of goodness and evil and even heroism.”

If you’re a student of 20th century history or of Spain, or want a clearer look at the unclear currents of war, Javier Cercas is definitely worth checking out.

(And no, there’s really no better word than “aleatory” in this context, is there?)