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Contemporary Fiction Views: Fatherhood and love share a wild ride [1]

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Date: 2025-05-20

Lloyd McNeil is getting by, adores his son, thinks well of his ex-wife and her new husband, and is grateful he is not the hard-ass cop his father was. His life is about to get a lot more complicated. Mostly because he doesn't have much time left.

In Will Leitch's new novel, Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride, Lloyd finds out he has mere weeks to live because of a brain tumor. Once Lloyd adds up his assets, thinking of what he can leave his brilliant, beloved son so he can go to a good college, he realizes the funds aren't enough. But, what if he was killed on the job? As a cop, his estate will benefit. Which means his son will benefit.

So Lloyd thinks through ways in which he can make his death happen. He figures out scenarios, determined that innocent people won't be harmed as well. But every time he tries, it's not working out. He's soon an internet sensation. This is definitely not going according to plan.

The incidents in which Lloyd tries, not for suicide by cop, but cop suicide by miscreant, are balanced between dark humor and compassion at how sometimes people end up in certain situations. The incident in which Lloyd and a suspect lock eyes is particularly insightful into the humanity of all people. It's a delicate balance that Leitch maintains throughout the novel.

As Lloyd's attempts backfire and his condition worsens, the past returns. Lloyd became an Atlanta cop because his father was the police chief. He thought he never had a choice, but Lloyd strived over the years to be the cop who listens, the cop who solves problems, not the cop who is so rigid he loses his own humanity. A taunting serial killer who Lloyd's father could not find was too much for the old man. After his father's death, the taunting was gone for years.

It's back now.

Leitch uses Lloyd's situation, especially being the son of a ramrod father and the father of an amazing kid, to write about the legacy of fathers. Lloyd's past, his father, are always with him. His legacy is an integral part of who he is, how he decided to live his life, how he has raised his son, and what he wants for his child when he is gone.

Amidst what could seem an outlandish set-up, Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride is a moving story of love. There is love of family and home, love of the past, present and future, love of good friends. There also is love for Atlanta in this novel. From the opening when Lloyd sits on top of his patrol car to marvel at the engineering spectacle that is Atlanta's Spaghetti Junction of freeways, this is a novel about what people can accomplish.

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Some of this week's new fiction follows, with links to The Literate Lizard and descriptions by the publishers.

Lone Dog Road by Kent Nerburn

Two Lakota boys, ages eleven and six, huddle in a boxcar hurtling through the prairie night as they run from a government agent sent to take the younger boy to an Indian boarding school. But what begins as a pursuit soon becomes a complex human drama of intersecting lives as the boys make their way across the vast Dakota plains to the pipestone quarries of western Minnesota to replace their great-grandfather’s channunpa, or sacred pipe, that was broken by the government agent.

Lucky Tomorrow: Stories by Deborah Jiang-Stein

For a Lucky Tomorrow Buy a Flower Today. Is it true? a prospective customer asks. About the luck? “Absolutely!” Felma says. Flowers, she knows, are all that’s anchored in this world, even if not for long, and like others in these luminous stories, Felma knows what it is to be rootless. In Lucky Tomorrow, Deborah Jiang-Stein presents an unforgettable cast of characters dreaming of redemption, purpose, and connection in a wounded yet beautiful world.

A young girl stuck working at her family’s candy stand. A former priest trapped on a crowded train. A prisoner robbed of the book she’s been writing. A father haunted by his broken family. A woman confined to a psych ward. A reverend caring for her dying housemate. And Felma, a flower vendor, searching for the daughter she gave birth to while in prison, who was swiftly bundled away. Felma’s story leads us in, through, and around the others—a central beating heart for these lives on the fringes, where Jiang-Stein finds a singular, tenacious humanity.

Gingko Season by Naomi Xu Elegant

After suffering her first big heartbreak two years earlier, Penelope Lin has built a quiet life with no romantic entanglements. She spends her days cataloging a museum’s vast collection of Qing Dynasty bound-foot shoes and in the comfortable company of close friends. One day, she happens to meet Hoang, who confesses to releasing mice from the cancer research lab where he works. Hoang’s openness catches Penelope off guard; from then on, she finds her carefully constructed life slowly start to unravel. Told in Penelope’s witty, vulnerable, and thoroughly endearing voice, Gingko Season captures three seasons of reawakening, challenges, and transformation.

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien

A novel that leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated by only a door.

Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China.

Memory, political revolution, generational change, and the ethical imagination are at the heart of Lina’s illuminating conversations with her fellows in the Sea: how we come to believe what we believe, and how every person is an irreplaceable, unique vessel of history. Through the guidance of these great thinkers, Lina equips herself to reckon with difficult questions of guilt, responsibility, and the possibility of redemption when her ailing father begins to reveal his role in their family’s tragic past.

That's All I Know by Elisa Levi

Nineteen-year-old Little Lea lives in a rural town where life ends at the edge of the forest.

When a stranger loses his dog on the first day after the end of the world, Little Lea warns him not to follow it into the forest, that people who enter never come out. Over a shared joint, she tells him about the burning in her gut, winding a tale of loss, desire, and conspiracies.

Little Lea sees the world through backcountry eyes that distrust the outsiders who come but who also get to leave. When she isn’t working at her mother’s grocery store, she cares for her empty-headed younger sister, Nora, who only cries when she’s in pain. Meanwhile, her friend Catalina does nothing but cry. Little Lea wants Javier to love her, and she doesn’t want Marco, who leaves weed and his best potatoes on her doorstep. As the town prepares for their end-of-the-world festival, she faces her intensifying desire to leave, that burning that unsettles her life—she wants to be useful somewhere else, even if it means being unloved, unwanted, unable to return. That’s all she knows.

Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan

In a small town in Ireland, the local people have weathered the storm of economic collapse and now look to the future: The jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the scars of its history, new stories have begun to unfold.

But an insidious menace now creeps through back-alley shadows and into the lives of the townspeople. Old grudges fester and new ones arise. Young people are lured by the promise of fast money while the generation above them tries to hold back the tide of an enemy beyond their control. And the peace of this town is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way.

A stunning, lyrical novel told in twenty-one voices, Heart, Be at Peace reveals a community that together looks to overcome the betrayals, secrets, and grudges that can divide families, neighbors, and entire generations.

Horsefly by Mireille Gagne

In 1942, a young entomologist, Thomas, is sent to a remote island to work on biological weapons for the Allied military. The scientists live like prisoners while they produce anthrax and look for the perfect virus carrier among the island’s many insects.

Sixty years later, in the same region of Quebec, a heat wave unleashes swarms of horseflies while humans fall prey to strange flights of rage. Theodore is living a simple life, working double shifts and drinking to forget, when a horsefly bite stirs him from his apathy. He impulsively kidnaps his grandfather, whose dementia has him living in the past on Grosse Île.

The horseflies, meanwhile, know a few secrets.

Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle

Konstantin Duhovny is a haunted man. His father died when he was ten, and ghosts have been hovering around him ever since. Kostya can’t exactly see the ghosts, but he can taste their favorite foods. Flavors of meals he’s never eaten will flood his mouth, a sign that a spirit is present. Kostya has kept these aftertastes a secret for most of his life, but one night, he decides to act on what he’s tasting. And everything changes.

Kostya discovers that he can reunite people with their deceased loved ones—at least for the length of time it takes them to eat a dish that he’s prepared. He thinks his life’s purpose might be to offer closure to grieving strangers, and sets out to learn all he can by entering a particularly fiery ring of Hell: the New York culinary scene. But as his kitchen skills catch up with his ambitions, Kostya is too blind to see the catastrophe looming in the Afterlife. And the one person who knows Kostya must be stopped also happens to be falling in love with him.

The Fate of Others: Stories by Richard Bausch

In these twelve new stories, Richard Bausch explores the passions of men and women facing unex­pected circumstances and the complications of modern life and love. In the novella “Donnaiolo,” for instance, the parents of a young divorcée who has returned from Italy and a failed marriage must deal with the completely different, and unappealing, person she has become. In “Isolation,” a happily married woman who has con­ceived an unexpected passion for another man learns, in lockdown during the pandemic, that this man—into whose life Bausch also gives us a window—has become ill with Covid. In a second novella, “Broken House,” an elderly Catholic man recalls his part in the destruction of an old farmhouse by altar boys who believed a monk had given them permission to destroy it—while also portraying his lifelong fascination with one of the boys, a gifted artist who has carried a secret for decades about the church they both wanted to serve as priests. And in still another story, “The Widow’s Tale,” a woman whose recently killed husband repeatedly visits her younger sister in dreams attends a séance.

Sike by Fred Lunzer

A story of boy meets girl meets AI therapist, Sike explores our aching pursuit of love and self-control

Adrian earns his living writing lyrics for rappers he never meets, and finds success with a hit song about his own fruitless search for love. After his last relationship ends in a spiral of angst, Adrian decides it’s time to try Sike: the new lauded and elite AI psychotherapy app that tracks your every move and emotion, and guides you toward mental contentment.

He soon falls for Maquie, a smart and pragmatic venture capitalist scouring London’s tech scene for the next business boom. She can see no potential investments though, nothing sparkles. She wants to find a business as successful as Sike, and yet she is also one of the holdouts who refuse to use it.

READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE

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