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Contemporary Fiction Views: Matters of the heart and brain [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-13
To many, science and faith are oil and water. But to some, they are entwined. They are two sides of the same coin. They are the study of tracking comets, and marveling at their beauty in the night sky above Earth.
Science and faith, love returned and unrequited, past and present are the crux of Sarah Perry's Enlightenment.
As with Perry's earlier novels, The Essex Serpent and Melmoth, what is real in the heart and in the mind are connected. When a character tries to separate them, that is when conflict arises in that character's life.
Enlightenment begins with Thomas Hart, a man old before his time who writes a column for the local newspaper on the night skies, local nature phenomena, and whatever else tickles his fancy. His life is a melding of faith and science. In addition to his astronomy studies, he is a longstanding member of a low church chapel that is a tightly knit community.
One Sunday, a six-day-old baby was brought to the service. Grace Macaulay was brought by her father after her mother died in childbirth. An ugly child, she still reaches into Thomas and snatches his heart. By the time she howls during the service, he knows he will love her and try to protect her from harm for the rest of his life.
Eighteen years later. Thomas encounters two other beings that will claim a portion of his heart. Maria was a woman brought from Romania more than a century ago to live in a big house in his small Essex town. The night skies meant everything to her, and she possibly discovered a comet before any man did.
Her existence comes to his knowledge via James, who discovers her through material at the museum where he works, and who passes the information along to Thomas. The confirmed bachelor, who has kept his identity as a gay man secret, falls in love with James and is enchanted, and haunted, by Maria.
The teenage Grace, a force of nature who revels in nonconformity and unruliness, shocks Thomas when a boy throws a rock through a chapel window during a service and decides this boy is someone she wants. Thomas has no idea what Grace sees in Nathan, but knows he will protect her.
In a newspaper column from about that time, he writes about comets and being a human being:
Sometimes I think of my own body in motion. What moves me on? What moves you? I suppose I could tell you what kind of sun draws me down my orbit, but there must be other forces at work that I can't make out. It comforts me to think of us all in motion, helpless against the forces of time and fate. We are just like the earth, I think: "insignificantly small," as Kepler said once, "but borne through stars."
Thomas is indeed a doubter, but one with a heart.
As the years go by, Thomas and Grace hurt each other deeply, at least one of them thinking they are doing the right thing. When life doesn't happen as they expect, they carry on. People come in and out of their lives, like a comet returning to Earth's skies while on its journey.
Thomas conceded to himself that he couldn't fully understand the image, only comprehend its beauty and trust in its significance. It was (said the accompanying text) a map of the galaxy Supercluster Laniakea, this meaning "immeasurable heaven": radio emissions from the near universe distilled into a gold cloud drifting against a ground of blue, speckled with white dots seeming to move as particles of water might move in mist. The shape of this cloud was the shape of a human heart, and it was marked all over with shining filaments that coursed out of the center with the look of capillaries carrying vital blood. ... A red dot marked the place, labeled as a map might be in Adleigh's municipal car park: YOU ARE HERE. Thomas rested his head on the table, and his hand on the image. the gold heart was beating against his palm: you are here, you are here, you are here.
Enlightenment refers not only to scientific advancement and acknowledgment, but also to the journey of self-discovery and awareness. Perry writes beautifully of these journeys. She is one of those writers who can look at a character without blinders, but with compassion for the basic humanity and innate search for love and knowledge within.
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This week's new publications include the latest from the remarkable Ocean Vuong, whose poetry and fiction are insightful and moving. Links are to The Literate Lizard, and descriptions are by the publishers.
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.
Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life.
Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen
“The afternoon of September first, dishwater-gray and rainy, a man named Dale Figgo picked up a hitchhiker on Gus Grissom Boulevard in Tangelo Shores, Florida. The hitchhiker, who reminded Figgo of Danny DeVito, asked for a lift to the interstate. Figgo said he’d take him there after finishing an errand.”
Thus begins Fever Beach, with an errand that leads—in pure Hiaasen-style — into the depths of Florida at its most Floridian: a sun-soaked bastion of right-wing extremism, white power, greed, and corruption. Figgo, it turns out, is the only hate-monger ever to be kicked out of the Proud Boys for being too dumb and incompetent. On January 6, 2021, he thought he was defacing a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, but he wound up spreading feces all over a statue of James Zacharia George, a Civil War Confederate war leader.
Speak to Me of Home by Jeanine Cummins
On her wedding day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1968, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón has mild misgivings, but she marries Peter Brennan Jr. anyway in a blaze of romantic optimism. She has no way of knowing how dramatically her life will change when she uproots her young family to start over in the American Midwest, unleashing a fleet of disappointments.
In the 1980s, against the backdrop of her mother’s isolation in St. Louis, Missouri, Rafaela’s daughter, Ruth, wants only to belong. Eager to fit in, Ruth lets go of her language, habits, and childhood memories of Puerto Rico. It’s not until decades later when Ruth’s own daughter, Daisy, returns to San Juan that her mother and grandmother begin to truly reflect on the choices that have come to define their lives.
When a hurricane ravages the island in 2023, leaving Daisy critically injured, Rafaela and Ruth return to the city where their story began. As they gather at Daisy’s bedside, we follow them back into the moments that brought them to this point: We watch as they come of age, fall in love, take risks, and contend with all the heartbreaks, triumphs, and reversals of fortune—both good and bad—that make up a meaningful life. As old memories come to light, so do buried secrets, leaving everyone in the family wondering exactly where it is that they belong.
Sleep by Honor Jones
Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made.
Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away.
Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents’ bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She’s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.
The Dark Maestro by Brendan Slocumb
His cello made him famous. His father made him a target.
Curtis Wilson is a cello prodigy, growing up in the Southeast D.C. projects with a drug dealer for a father. But through determination and talent, and the loving support of his father’s girlfriend, Larissa, Curtis claws his way out of his challenging circumstances and rises to unimagined heights in the classical music world—even soloing with the New York Philharmonic.
And then, suddenly, his life disintegrates. His father, Zippy, turns state’s evidence, implicating his old bosses. Now the family—Curtis included—must enter the witness protection program if they want to survive. This means Curtis must give up the very thing he loves the most: sharing his extraordinary music with the world. When Zippy’s bosses prove too elusive for law enforcement, Curtis, Zippy, and Larissa realize that their only chance of survival is to take on the criminals themselves. They must create new identities and draw on their unique talents, including Curtis’s musical ability, to go after the people who want them dead. But will it be enough to save Curtis and his family?
Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan
Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape—but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay.
Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she’d abandoned. Listening to Mia, allowing her memories to become entangled with Bo’s own, she’s struck by how much history will be lost as the city gives way to water. Then Mia’s health turns, and Bo determines to honor their disappearing world and this woman who’s brought her back to it, a project that teaches her the lessons that matter most: how to care, how to be present, how to commemorate a life and a place, soon to be lost forever.
Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson
Ever since her dad left them twenty years ago, it’s been just Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While it’s a bit lonely, she sometimes admits, and a less exciting life than what she imagined for herself, it’s mostly okay. Mostly.
Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister. Reuben — left behind by their dad thirty years ago — has hired a detective to track down their father and a string of other half siblings. And he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable to find them all.
As Mad and Rube — and eventually the others — share stories of their father, who behaved so differently in each life he created, they begin to question what he was looking for with every new incarnation. Who are they to one another? What kind of man will they find? And how will these new relationships change Mad’s previously solitary life on the farm?
Happiness Forever by Adelaide Faith
Sylvie is happy only when she’s in therapy. This is because Sylvie is in love with her therapist; she thinks about her every second they’re not together (roughly 167 hours and 10 minutes per week). In that room, Sylvie is able to talk about everything: the false hope promised by eighties music; what a dog’s inner life is really like and how sad, she, Sylvie is, outside that room. She’s aware she has an obsession, but whether it’s some flavor of erotic transference or a lost person’s need to connect, Sylvie isn’t sure.
Outside therapy Sylvie has what she considers to be a small life: a job as a veterinary nurse, companionship from her tattoo artist friend via text, and seaside walks with her brain-damaged dog, Curtains. But maybe therapy is making a difference, inviting her to imagine possibilities — possibilities that include a new friend she meets on the beach.
When the therapist starts to prepare Sylvie for the terrible fact that all treatment has to come to an end, Sylvie can’t stop herself from imagining sleeping in her car parked outside the therapist’s house. That won’t work. She has to be brave.
Circular Motion by Alex Foster
The acceleration of Earth’s spin begins gradually. At first, days are just a few seconds shorter than normal. Awareness of the mysterious phenomenon hasn’t reached Tanner, a young man preoccupied with dreams of escaping his tiny Alaskan hometown. One night, desperate to make his mark on the world, he runs away. He lands an unlikely job at CWC, the operator of a network of massive aircraft that orbit the Earth at 30,000 feet, revolutionizing global transportation. Now goods and people can travel anywhere in little more than an hour — you can visit Paris for an evening or order sushi from Japan. But just as Tanner settles into his new life and begins to consider if his feelings for a male colleague might be more than platonic, CWC is shaken by a wave of social unrest and protest.
That unrest sweeps up Winnie. A high school outcast in an era of street protests, wild parties, and online savagery, Winnie falls in with a group of teen activists who blame CWC for the planet’s acceleration. As days on Earth quicken to twenty-three hours, then twenty, the sun rising and setting ever faster, causing violent storms and political meltdowns, Tanner and Winnie’s stories spiral closer together. They meet cynical executives toiling to forestall the crises they created and religious zealots for whom the apocalypse can’t come soon enough, lobbyists and lovers all coping in their own ways, and Victor Bickle — the self-aggrandizing TV scientist whose shameful secret will bind Tanner and Winnie’s fates.
The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne
Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the hell that awaits her at their destination, Yetunde finds help in an unexpected form— the Devil himself. The Devil, seeking a way to reenter the pearly gates of heaven, decides to prove himself to an indifferent God by protecting Yetunde and granting her a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde makes an incredible sacrifice.
Their bargain extends far beyond Yetunde's mortal lifespan. Over the next 175 years, the Devil visits Yetunde's descendants in their darkest hour of need: Lucille, a conjure woman; Asa, who passes for white; Louis and Virgil, who risk becoming a twentieth-century Cain and Abel; Cassandra, who speaks to the dead; James, who struggles to make sense of the past while fighting to keep his family together; and many others. The Devil offers each of them his own version of salvation, all the while wondering: can he save himself, too?
Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang
Enka meets Mathilde in art school. Mathilde is a dizzyingly talented yet tortured artist whose star is on the rise—and Enka, struggling to make art that feels original, is immediately drawn to her. The two strike up a close friendship that soon turns codependent. But when Mathilde’s fame reaches new heights, Enka becomes desperate to keep her best friend close—no matter the cost.
Enka quickly falls in love with and marries a billionaire whose family’s company is funding a cutting-edge technology purported to enhance empathy, and which could allow someone else to inhabit Mathilde’s mind and absorb the trauma from her brain. Soon, the boundaries between Mathilde and Enka begin to blur even further, setting in motion a haunting series of events that forever change their lives.
Make Me Famous by Maud Ventura
Ever since she was a child, Cléo, the French-American daughter of two academics, has had only one obsession: becoming a famous singer. Over the years, to everyone’s surprise but her own, she overcomes every obstacle and becomes a global superstar with millions of dollars, countless awards, and several Los Angeles villas to her name. But as any celebrity will tell you, getting to the top is one thing; staying there is another.
Now thirty-three years old, Cléo is taking her first real vacation in years, on a remote island with no one else in sight. With the never-ending spin cycle of her life finally on pause and no paparazzi peeking out from behind the coconut palms, she can work on her fourth album in peace. Except that with so much time to think, she can’t help but ruminate on her past—including how, just six months earlier, things started to go very, very wrong.
We, the Casertas by Aurora Venturini
We, the Casertas is the story of Chela, the first-born child to a wealthy family in Buenos Aires. Threatened by her extraordinary intellect, her parents immediately take against her, instead lavishing attention on her beautiful sister. Chela is soon exiled to the attic and allowed to run wild, her only friend a lame owl with whom she explores the countryside.
Chela’s intellectual curiosity grows and she becomes a brilliant student, excelling at subject after subject, and eventually breaking free of the family that has always misunderstood her. But her troubles don’t end there. After falling in love with a married man more than twice her age, she has her heart broken when he refuses to divorce his wife. In her hurt, she flees to Chile where she befriends Pablo Neruda, before heading to Europe where she falls in with a trio of mysterious aristocratic intellectuals dabbling in black magic. After her estate is appropriated by the Peronist government, Chela goes in search of her great aunt in Sicily where she embarks upon a passionate affair, goes treasure hunting with local sailors, and discovers an old family relic.
The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje
An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination: Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth? In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatized man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest of literature can achieve.
Sing the Truth: The Kweli Journal Short Story Collection edited by Laura Pegram
Hailed as “The Paris Review of BIPOC literature,” The Kweli Journal has been a launching pad for many of today’s most celebrated writers. Kweli — “truth” in Swahili — marks its fifteenth anniversary with this luminous collection edited by founder Laura Pegram. These vivid narratives explore the devastation of leaving home and the struggle to adapt to reimagined lives, lost loves, distant families, and buried pasts, deepening our understanding of the human experience.
A Terrifying Brush with Optimism: New and Selected Stories by Brian Leung
In a cultural moment where folks are stripped of their dignity or shed it willingly, the figures in this book wonder at the utility of maintaining their own. There's a touch of Hamlet's question in there along with some I Ching. Can monkeys pray? Are we better off living in the real world or a speculative one?
The World So Wide by Zilla Jones
Grenada, 1983. Opera star Felicity returns to her mother’s homeland to perform a benefit recital and reconnect with a past lover, but when an armed coup traps her under house arrest with her estranged friends in the revolutionary government, she reflects on her life as she navigates political tensions to survive.
Felicity Alexander should be charming audiences at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, not under house arrest in Grenada in October 1983, as rumours swirl that United States troops are preparing to invade.
Born and raised in Winnipeg, the daughter of a Grenadian woman and an absent white father, Felicity is blessed with enviable beauty and an extraordinary singing voice. Arriving in London to study opera in 1965, she finds early success and joy on stage, as well as a sense of belonging in the arms of the charming Claude Buckingham. Members of the West Indian Students Association, Claude and his friends are law students and activists. They plan to return to Grenada to overthrow the corrupt dictator, “Uncle” Percy Tibbs.
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