What We Are Reading in March

The city you grew up in is gone, and people keep disappearing. Your mother joins in a housewives’ protest that ends in police helicopters unleashing a glittery spray that turns protestors into statues. Then it’s just you and your father, until he is absorbed into the TV gifted by the government. Now, you spot him doing tai chi or picking through leftovers in the background of soap operas. And didn’t you once have a little sister, before she flew away in her school uniform? As the police go undercover and transform your neighborhood into a violent labyrinth you can no longer navigate, where does this leave you? Lucid, nightmarish, and indelible, “City of Water” is a wondrous and pointed message in a bottle from a city not so different from your own

Though Franny and her husband are not “cruise people,” Franny wants to host a cruise vacation for her mother’s 70th birthday. But as her husband points out, Franny and her mother aren’t close, and it feels wrong to be on a cruise after the recent 9/11 attacks.

Also on board is Doug, an aging actor who is reluctantly joining former castmates on a reunion cruise for a hit TV show filmed on the same ship. Now sober, Doug dreads the dark specter of past misdeeds. Meanwhile, Lucy, the only Black female graduate student in her department at MIT, has uncharacteristically accepted an invitation to join her roommate on the cruise — a decision reflecting her growing ambivalence about the tech companies pursuing her. This novel explores how we balance our needs and our wants, as well as the regrets we live with and the chances to set them right.

Birdie Chang is a woman on the run, desperate for an escape from the headlines back home — and from Calvin Boyer, her childhood abuser. On the way to her new home on Whidbey Island, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger on the ferry who offers her a sinister solution and a plan for revenge.

Meanwhile, Linzie King, a former reality TV star, recently revealed her own encounters with Calvin in her memoir — much of which sounds familiar to Birdie. Soon after, Calvin’s mother receives news that her son has been murdered.

Calvin’s death sends each woman on a desperate search for answers. A complex whodunit told from alternating points of view, “Whidbey” explores the reach of violence and our flawed systems of incarceration and rehabilitation. It questions the pursuit of justice and who has real power over a story: the one who lives it, or the one who tells it?

Born in Palestine, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and leaves his family. In a small Italian town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the promise of the West. When life takes him to New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman. Finally, he finds himself in the vast open skies of the Arizona desert.

Sufien’s life spans friendships lost and maintained, the freedom of the open road, fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife. The lyrical pages of “Paradiso 17” weave in and out of time and space. They are haunting, yet throbbing with light — what Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, and the brilliant light of a life lived.

Iranian exile Yadollah is barely scraping by in 1990s Paris. He lives in a run-down attic apartment with his friend Seyyed and his girlfriend Ra’na. Their apartment building is full of eccentric neighbors, most of them fellow down-on-their-luck exiles from all over the world. When a mysterious new neighbor arrives on the scene, a man who ominously goes by the name of Prophet, Yadollah and his friends’ world is turned upside down.

Yadollah suddenly finds himself confronted by the Islamic angels of death, and realizes that he must untangle the mystery of his own murder, which occurred at some unknown point after Prophet’s arrival. Suspenseful, yet darkly humorous, this book explores the trauma of displacement, and challenges readers to piece together the story of a life shattered by exile.