Underground Fugue
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Editors' Choice
Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Finalist
“A pleasure to read from beginning to end.” —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March
Esther, an American art conservator, has fled New York for London—partly to escape her failing marriage, partly to tend to her dying mother. On her first night there, she spots a young man returning home very late, wet and muddy, to the house next door. Their eyes connect and he disappears inside.
This first encounter sparks Esther’s curiosity about her new neighbors: Amir, the moody college student she caught sneaking in, and, more intruiguing still, Amir’s father, Javad—a neuroscientist from Iran.
Throughout the spring, a tentative friendship blossoms, but when terrorists attack London’s tube and bus lines in July, Esther finds her relationship with Javad strained by her gnawing suspicions about Amir . . . suspicions that will ultimately upend the possibilities for the future, and reveal the deep stamp of the past.
Sweeping, suspenseful, and exquisitely written, Underground Fugue is a powerful testament to how human connection can survive history’s most fearsome echoes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In music, a fugue is a composition where two or more voices hand off a theme to each other, enriching it in their interplay; in psychology, a fugue is a dissociative state, a forgetting and flight from the self. Singer's novel utilizes both meanings for an unusually layered debut. In short, taut chapters, the novel alternates between two families who have suddenly become neighbors. Esther's surface reason for coming to London from New York in 2005 is to take care of her mother, Lonia, who's dying of cancer. But it becomes clear as the story progresses that she is in flight from the emotional pain following her son Noah's drowning, and from the dissolution of her marriage. Her neighbor Javad Asghari is an Iranian-born doctor researching the true case of the "Piano Man," an unidentified person who can't or won't speak and has become a tabloid sensation. Javad too has a failed marriage. His 19-year-old son, Amir (who is about the same age Noah would have been), has a penchant for exploring London's underground, a fact that will become significant as the plot approaches the July 2005 bombings. Interspersed are Lonia's memories of fleeing Poland in 1939. Occasionally the novel stumbles as the characters intertwine in predictably romantic ways, or when the themes of loss and longing are sounded for a bit too long. However, when terror strikes, the plot accelerates and the novel's strands converge brilliantly. Singer's debut novel satisfyingly fulfills a good novel's aim: to shed light on "the secret interiors of other people's lives."
