Author: Jennifer Graham

Entitlement, by Rumaan Alam (Riverhead, 288 pages)

One of the more peculiar aspects of our society is that some of us have so much money that it’s actually a challenge to get rid of it, and some of us have so little that we work multiple jobs just to keep the lights on. In a just world, the former problem would cancel out the latter, but it’s not.

Rumaan Alam tackles this paradox in Entitlement, his fourth novel, which explores the prickly issues of both money and race. It is a compelling storyline: A young Black woman is hired to work for an aging white billionaire who has established a foundation to distribute his money to worthy causes.

The fictional Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation has shades of the real-life “Giving Pledge” that many billionaires have signed. Asher Jaffee made his money with a company that delivered office supplies (“Jaffee … in a Jiffy!” was its brilliant motto). Now 83, he still has the kind of energy in which he bounds, rather than walks, and has no interest in retiring. In fact, he is more comfortable in an office than at home. “The office was the place where things happened, the place where he was necessary, the site of his every victory.”

At the foundation, Asher has a small and fiercely devoted staff that tends to his four-day work week, which is filled with people wanting to talk to him about his money.

Brooke Orr, 33, enters this world after nine years of unsatisfying work as a teacher. She is the adopted daughter of a single mom, an attorney who works in the vaguely defined field of reproductive health and who chose to raise her children with the help of three close female friends, rather than within the confines of marriage. Brooke’s own circle includes the daughter of one of her mother’s friends, Kim, and a gay man, Matthew, that they befriended while all were matriculating at Vassar College. (“As Brooke saw it, she and Kim were continuing what their mothers had started: a most modern little family.”)

When she joins the Jaffee Foundation, Brooke is doing well enough but is also in the vaguely annoying position of watching those around her seem to do even better. Her brother is engaged to be married, and though she loves him and doesn’t herself want to get married, her interactions with the couple give way to sardonic inner dialogue on “the smugness of young people who believe they have invented love.” Meanwhile, her friend Kim has recently come into an enormous inheritance, sum unknown, that has allowed her to pay cash for an apartment worth $2 million.

While Brooke loves her friend and is genuinely glad for her good fortune, the imbalance still puts a quiet strain on their relationship. After seeing the new place for the first time, “She saw Kim’s succession of Sundays in this two-bedroom apartment. She saw coffee-stained cups upside down in the dishwasher, saw flowers bought on impulse slouching on a table, saw an orange peel, dried into brittle shells, left to molder on the marble countertop. The cleaning lady would see to that. She saw comfort and solitude and joy and it looked absolutely thrilling to her. Kim was dear, Kim was good, but Kim had done nothing to deserve any of this earthly comfort. And wasn’t the universe meant to work that way, wasn’t it governed by justice?”

But Brooke is enjoying her own good fortune, in that Asher Jaffee has been impressed by their limited interactions and wants her to have more responsibility. She’s smart, and he sees this, but it’s also possible that he’s wanting to have a fatherly influence on Brooke — with her father out of the picture all of her life, and his own daughter having died in the 9/11 attacks at age 38.

Jaffee is generous with his money, his time and his advice, telling her, “Demand something from the world. Demand the best. Demand it.”

Brooke internalizes the advice and begins to change subtly as she grows into the position and assumes more responsibility. But she also uses Jaffee’s advice as justification for bad choices as she becomes more comfortable in the moneyed world and wants her share.

Alam’s previous novels include 2020’s acclaimed Leave the World Behind (which I loved and awarded a rare A+). That book also explored contemporary themes, including race. Entitlement strives, but never achieves the tension that ripples through Leave the World Behind, making it both a smart cultural critique and an old-fashioned page-turner. Nor does Entitlement convince the reader to care all that much about either Brooke or Asher and what happens to them. Brooke has a narrative arc, to be sure, but at no point in it does she want anyone to love her.

Alam’s voice is fresh and unique, and his cultural observations spot-on. While Entitlement will likely win many accolades and maybe make a short-list or two for a prestigious award, it is, like Brooke’s pre-Asher life, ultimately unsatisfying, even for a cautionary tale. B-

William, by Mason Coile (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 224 pages)

Earlier this year, Ray Kurzwell gave us a cheery picture of the coming world under artificial intelligence in The Singularity is Nearer. A bone-chilling alternate view is offered in Mason Coile’s novel William, a stand-out in the nascent genre of “AI horror.”

You probably won’t want to read it right before you go to bed, but it is a perfect autumn read as the story transpires on a single day: Halloween.

The titular “William” is a half-finished robot that is the project of Henry, a brilliant agoraphobic engineer who can’t leave his home without dissolving into panic — fans of the Breaking Bad universe might think of Chuck McGill in Better Call Saul, just with a different illness and profession.

Henry has built several robotic creatures, including a dog and a creepy little magician riding a small bicycle. But William is to be his ultimate creation — the robot appears to have developed consciousness — and Henry’s preoccupation with the project seems to stem not so much from personal ambition but from distracting himself from his crumbling marriage to Lily, a wealthy computer engineer.

“Things are bad between them, but not too bad,” Henry keeps reassuring himself, even though “he worries that his assessment of the bridgeable distance between himself and his wife is an error of judgment — the same made by millions of husbands right before the end.”

Things have regressed to the point where he is sleeping in the spare room of the couple’s old but cutting-edge Victorian home, a place where windows open, water heats and doors lock via voice command, in a neighborhood where drones “buzzing like honeybees” fly overhead with deliveries all day. Lily wears glasses that are connected to her computer, allowing her to access email by blinking.

It’s the sort of smart house we can envision not too far in the future. Henry created it, like he created William, who spends his time locked in the attic reading books and listening to NPR and Broadway show tunes on a transistor radio. While he can learn and converse with Henry, his body consists only of a torso, arms and head, and he is valiantly trying to make himself mobile, even to the point of attaching wheels to his chair while Henry is away.

It’s clear that Henry’s mental illness — the onset of which is not initially explained — is contributing to the couple’s marital problems, although Lily seems to be trying to help him as best she can. On this day, she has invited two former coworkers, Paige and Davis, to the house for lunch, and as they meet we see that he’s not only agoraphobic but seriously antisocial, the kind of person whose conversation always seems awkward or haughty. (One of the first things he says to Paige, while internally noting “the wasted efforts that have gone into her appearance,” is “your sleeves are too long.”)

After a bit of this uncomfortable interaction, Henry decides the best way to get through the visit is to introduce everyone to William. Even Lily hasn’t seen him, or even been allowed into the attic at this point — she only knows that her husband has been working on conscious AI.

Henry goes up first, to warn William that he is having guests, asking him to behave — the robot has a tendency to make somewhat snarky contents, to try to psychoanalyze Henry, explain his problems. “‘Don’t worry, I’ll be sweet as pie,’ the robot says, drawing a cross over its nonexistent heart’.”

Of course, he is not. And what transpires when the four go up to the lab sets in a motion a cascade of tension that leads to full-blown horror, which is not typically the kind of fare I enjoy, either in literature or in film. But I took one for this team, and was ultimately glad I did, as a series of shocking twists in the story, and the existential questions the novel raises more than made up for the unpleasant scenes.

Mason Coile is a pen name for Canadian author Andrew Pyper, who seems to be channeling Stephen King in this story. He packs a lot to ponder in this short book, which some have described as a one-sitting read. (True only if you tend to sit for long periods.)

Pyper has said that he originally wrote William as a short story, then tried to sell it as a screenplay without success, and only turned it into a novel after the first iterations failed to sell. He seems to have found the perfect length — the novel is tightly coiled, like a snake, with just the right amount of exposition, and a punch-perfect ending. It is the sort of book you have to read twice — the second time to go back and see all the foreshadowing of events that you might have missed the first time.

It’s also the sort of book you’ll want to share and talk about it, as it raises interesting questions about the nature of AI and whether artificial intelligence is something around which human beings can really install guardrails. Even God didn’t seem to do that, as Lily observes at one point — God just created without thought to the consequences, she thinks. “If beauty or discovery was the result — if chaos was the result — it didn’t matter. It only mattered that something astonishing was born.”

I don’t like horror, but I loved this absorbing, disturbing little book. A

Meet the Neighbors, by Brandon Keim (W.W. Norton, 368 pages)

With all the studies and books published on animal intelligence in the past decade, did we really need another one? Well, yes, it turns out we did. Brandon Keim, a science and nature writer who lives in Bangor, Maine, has found a new twist on the subject in Meet the Neighbors.

Culling from copious research, Keim takes a Mr. Rogers approach to animal science, reporting his findings while strolling through “the everyday landscape of a suburban neighborhood” and pointing out the various animals residing there. While this may seem a sophomoric endeavor to some, he argues otherwise, saying that the central question of our time is “How might an awareness of animal minds shape the ways we understand them and, ultimately, how we live with them on this shared, precious planet?” In other words, until we approach animals as compadres in the struggle, we are getting them, and our own moral development, wrong.

Challenge him at your own risk: No less than Charles Darwin was a fan of the lowly earthworm, about which he wrote a surprise bestseller. (The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Actions of Worms is not quite as catchy a title as On the Origin of Species.) In this, Darwin’s final book, he wrote of earthworms, “they deserve to be called intelligent.”

Keim’s interest in the topic came from his realization that the birds he watched bathing daily in a local reservoir “were like locals at a coffee shop or the gym. They were my neighbors.” Since most Americans actually know little about their human neighbors, this might not be the best argument for learning more about squirrels and chipmunks.

A better argument comes from the quote by the writer and Whole Earth Catalog co-founder Stewart Brand, who said, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” When Keim first came across this quote, he said, it “grated” at him, but he came to accept the hard truth in it: that we all make decisions every day that affect the lives of other creatures, whether it’s something as simple as turning over a stone and disrupting a small colony of insects, or clearing a wooded lot for a house.

“But we could turn the phrase a bit differently than Brand,” Keim writes. “We might as well be good neighbors.” This involves questions with ethical considerations, such as “what do we owe so-called pets, or animals who are sick or injured? How do we live with predators whose presence is not always welcomed?” In attempting to answer these questions, Keim walks us through a brief history of animal rights, from Aristotle to Peter Singer, at times including nauseating detail about animal cruelty, and the challenges that remain. (For example: “the federal Animal Welfare Act exempts farm animals and most lab animals; the Humane Slaughter Act doesn’t apply to chickens or fish, who account for the vast majority of farmed animals.” And protections for wild animals mostly apply to endangered species.) This section feels a bit thin, coming so soon after the masterful treatment of the subject in Our Kindred Creatures by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, and Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals, earlier this year.

But when Keim resumes his neighborhood walks (which aren’t limited to where he lives now, but include other places he’s lived and traveled), he uses his own experience to explore animals that don’t get as much sympathetic treatment, as, say, dogs or elephants. He takes up the neighborly cause for rats and cormorants, waterbirds that are among the most hated birds in the world, with contempt for them going back to the biblical book of Leviticus. While he once hated the bird, Keim sees a flock and envisions them as “returning home after a day’s work” with family, friends and acquaintances and thinks about what stories they would communicate to each other. He talks to an ecologist studying the effects of pollution who adopted a deformed baby cormorant that he named Cosmos and who later became something of a minor celebrity because of their media appearances.

He also takes up a subject that gets too little attention: the cultural cognitive dissonance when it comes to animals that allows us to be entranced when a raccoon climbs an office building in Minnesota, becoming a social media star, and yet also considers that species a pest to be eradicated. The story Keim tells of a Canada man who raised and released a baby raccoon only to have the raccoon return two years later for a visit will cause you to reconsider hiring a pest control company — or at least any that don’t consider the animals’ welfare as well as the humans’.

Even the most ardent of animal lovers claim the right to kill animals in self-defense, but do we also have the right to kill them when they damage our property, invade our homes or generally fit the definition of “nuisance”? The law usually says so. But even when people try to deal with nuisance animals in a humane way — by trapping and relocating them, for example — that may turn out to be just a slower form of death.

The Canadian man who had raised the raccoon later went on to run his own “pest control” company with humane methods, and told Keim an amazing story about a client who had a raccoon living in a garage with a nest of babies. They couldn’t figure out how the raccoon was getting in or out until he one night watched the raccoon push the button that opened the garage door.

“As best as he could figure, she would go outside at night while the homeowner slept, then close the door when she returned in the morning’s wee hours, leaving her humans none the wiser.” It’s an astonishing story and bolsters Keim’s contention that understanding “the neighbors” makes us less likely to want to kill them, and more likely to want to find ways to live in harmony. B

Burn,by Peter Heller (Knopf, 291 pages)

Jess and Storey have been friends since they were kids growing up in a small town in southern Vermont. As adults, they maintained their friendship, in part by spending several weeks each year hunting off the grid. In fact, it was those trips that killed Jess’s marriage. His wife wasn’t happy with his lengthy absences to hunt and fish when he couldn’t make time to vacation with her.

Jess is still mourning the loss of his wife and dog, and clutching the prayer stone that Jan had once given him, when he joins Storey to hunt in north-central Maine one September. But his personal tragedy soon shrinks in the middle of a bigger one.

When the men try to return to civilization after more than a week off the grid, they find that civilization, as they know it, has vanished — the bridge they’d previously crossed blown up, no cell service, towns incinerated, the residents missing except for a few corpses.The second Civil War, it seems, has come to New England.

Burn is novelist Peter Heller’s take on a popular theme: the idea that America’s polarization could lead to secession and war, trivialized by some with the euphemism “national divorce.” There have been numerous fiction and nonfiction books exploring this theme, and a movie earlier this year.

But Burn is no made-for-Hollywood thriller that exploits the country’s tensions. It aims higher with a story that explores family, betrayal, secrets and friendship. The savage conflict is just an accelerant that elevates the stakes.

The story begins with Jess and Storey emerging from the woods to find a gory mystery: Where are the people who lived in the incinerated towns? Why were their cars torched, while boats at the marina were left untouched? And most pressing of all, who was responsible? The federal government, or militias, or a foreign invader? “Jess began to carry a stone in his gut he recognized as dread,” Heller writes.

The men, both in their late thirties, surmised that the violence was related to “secession mania” that had pitted Mainers against each other. “But no one had expected it to come to full-bore civil strife. They had discussed the risk while planning the trip and decided that what was happening in Maine was no worse than the stirrings of revolt in Idaho and the failed secession vote in Texas the year before. These were fringe minorities, vocal and passionate, but not a real threat.”

Storey — who lives in Burlington, Vermont, with his wife and two daughters — and Jess, who lives in Colorado — have no dog in this fight. But they also have no way to get out, once they realize that all the combatants seem to be shooting everyone they see on sight. Their primary problem is sheer survival as they try to figure out how to escape what seems to have become a war zone.

They scavenge food and coffee from boats, and camp deep in the woods, as they plot a way out. Storey grows increasingly worried about his family, while Jess ruminates on what he has already lost, and his teenage years, providing flashbacks into his pre-apocalypse life, in which he spent most of his time with Storey’s idyllic, warm family, feeling unloved by his own parents, who mostly seemed to care about books.

There is little time for contemplation, however, as the men have to keep moving. The danger they are in is underscored when helicopters appear without warning, firing on someone in a boat, and at one point the two friends have to fire on other men who are shooting at them; while both are experienced hunters, neither has ever shot at another human being, let alone killed one. And by means of a ham radio they come across, they are able to learn snippets of what is transpiring around them, from a Canadian broadcast in French.

All of this provides tension enough to sustain a whole book, but Heller surprises his readers with two turns of events — one in the present day, one in the past — that raise the stakes even beyond the hellscape they are navigating. The introduction of these subplots adds complexity to the men’s journey, and at one point threatens their friendship.

Full disclosure: I was already a Heller fan, having read 2012’s The Dog Stars, 2014’s The Painter and 2023’s The Last Rangers (and given each of them an A). But not every author gets better with age, and with the subject matter, I was prepared for Burn to disappoint. It did not.

An accomplished outdoorsman who grew up in New York, went to high school in Vermont and attended Dartmouth College, Heller’s writing is suffused with knowledge of nature and sport, and New England. In Burn, he uses the names of real towns, not fictional ones, which might be disconcerting to lovers of Maine, as the conflict widens. But it’s also interesting to see this sort of story, which a more predictable writer might have set in a southern state, play out where it does.

The problem with a book like Burn is that the reader is anxious to get to the end to find out what happens to the characters, but at the same time doesn’t want their story to end. Heller has not written sequels before, but Burn is deserving of one. While he delivers as satisfying an ending as possible in a story this bleak, we still want to know what happens next.

“Always leave them wanting more” is a phrase attributed to P.T. Barnum. Heller employs the tactic well. Still, I’d pay $50 cash right now for Burn 2. A

—Jennifer Graham

The Singularity is Nearer, by Ray Kurzweil (Viking, 312 pages)

If there is anyone who can envision how artificial intelligence will change our lives in the next few decades, it’s Ray Kurzweil, whose title at Google includes the words “AI visionary.”

Kurzwell has been working in the industry for more than six decades. So when he tells us that “the singularity” — the merger of humans with AI — is likely to occur by 2045 and will be “utterly transformative,” we’d best pay attention.

Building on his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil examines the developments in AI since then, as well as its impact on jobs, health, longevity, and the risks that technology poses. It’s widely believed that AI will soon pass the “Turing test” — the point at which AI’s response to questions is indistinguishable from humans’ — which Kurzweil expects to occur by 2029. That milestone, he believes, will launch us into the fifth epoch of development, connecting our brains with computers that “will allow us to add many more layers to our neocortices — unlocking vastly more complex and abstract cognition than we can currently imagine.”

Augmented in this way, the enhanced human brain will eventually “become more than 99.9 percent nonbiological” in two ways, Kurzweil says: “One is the gradual introduction of nanobots to the brain tissue itself. These may be used to repair damage or replace neurons that have stopped working. The other is connecting the brain to computers, which will both provide the ability to control machines directly with our thoughts and allow us to integrate digital layers of neocortex in the cloud.”

As AI is advancing even quicker than many futurists initially believed, it seems the digitization of the human mind will likely happen within the lifetimes of many people who are alive today. Kurzweil, who lives near Boston, is 76 and he believes he will live to see it.

“As nanotechnology takes off, we will be able to produce an optimized human body at will: we’ll be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them,” Kurzweil writes. “We will think millions of times faster, but most importantly we will not be dependent on the survival of any of our bodies for our selves to survive.”

There’s another, controversial word for all this, which Kurzweil doesn’t use: transhumanism. And much of what Kurzweil envisions is dependent on nanotechnology, the development and implantation of nanobots, almost unimaginably tiny robots that could roam our bodies, repairing or removing malfunctioning cells. (To give you an idea of scale, there are more than 25 million nanometers in an inch; Kurzweil describes a nanobot as about the size of a human cell.)

While some forms of medical nanotechnology are already in testing on animals, the life-changing nanobots that Kurzweil is talking about don’t actually exist yet. He’s largely talking about what could happen, and the future may not be as rosy as he thinks.

He acknowledges as much in a chapter titled “Peril” in which he examines scenarios where AI doesn’t help us but leads to the mass extinction of anything carbon-based. He nods at Bill Joy’s famous essay “The Future Doesn’t Need Us,” published in 2000 in Wired magazine, and the “gray goo” theory, which posits that self-replicating nanobots that consume or otherwise destroy living things could wipe out the Earth’s biomass within a matter of weeks. Nanobots could also be used as military weapons, delivering virtually undetectable poisons to whole populations. But the technology can also be used for defense systems, and technology companies are taking these sorts of doomsday scenarios seriously and devising safeguards.

While Kurzweil is trying to write for a general audience, and largely succeeds, the book at times descends into college-textbook dryness when he explains various technologies. But he turns out to be a surprisingly engaging philosopher as he navigates the ethical issues surrounding AI.

A chapter titled “Who Am I?” examines subjective consciousness, or qualia, and the trouble with assuming AI can never acquire it, as well as the issues that arise as we get closer to “resurrecting” the dead with avatars or replicants created using photos and video, texts, interviews and other data about loved ones. (Kurzweil has done something like this with his own father, collecting everything his father had ever written, including love letters to his mother, and then using AI to have a “conversation” with his deceased father, or as he put it, his “dad bot.”)

Another question he delves into is how much of our essential selves we might lose as our body parts — even the brain — are rebuilt as Lee Majors was in the old TV series The Six Million Dollar Man.

Kurzweil recalls the thought experiment of ancient Greeks who pondered what happens when an old ship is gradually rebuilt using new planks. If the old planks are stored and then reassembled into a ship again, which is the original? The stakes are higher when it comes to human beings. “For most of us, it matters a great deal whether the person standing next to us is really our loved one or is just a Chalmersian zombie putting on a convincing show.”

For those of us who can live long enough to take advantage, Kurzweil assures us that “radical life extension is close at hand.” That may make you want to start exercising and eating right, or to take up drinking and smoking posthaste. Either seems a rational decision, given what is headed our way. B

—Jennifer Graham

The Cliffs, by J. Courtney Sullivan (Knopf, 369 pages)

When her ne’er-do-well mother dies, Jane Flanagan’s only inheritance is a dog named Walter, “an orange powder puff of a thing” that Jane was convinced her mother loved more than her daughters. She knew her mother had nothing of value to pass on, but “Walter was so much worse than nothing.”

Even in death, her mother caused Jane trouble.

In life, her mother’s drinking and other poor choices led the teenage Jane to hide out at an abandoned house, pale purple and creepy, that sat on a cliff overlooking the ocean in Maine. The home had been built in 1846 and it had the vibe of houses abandoned in zombie movies — dusty furniture, random toys, a collapsed railing, food expired decades ago that animals had gotten into. Still, Jane felt drawn to the house and didn’t feel she was breaking any laws by going into it to sit quietly or read: “It felt like honoring whatever came before.”

That’s how we meet Jane in The Cliffs, the sixth novel of acclaimed Massachusetts author J. Courtney Sullivan. A smart and conscientious young woman, Jane soon leaves the dumpster fire that is her family home, earns multiple degrees, travels and gets a great job and boyfriend. The purple house recedes in her mind.

Meanwhile, the house beckons another woman, Genevieve, who is the polar opposite of Jane. Married, moneyed and entitled, Genevieve convinces her husband to buy the house and to entrust her with its renovation as a vacation house for the family of three. Unlike Jane, she is not respectful of the home’s history; when a contractor she hired to install an infinity pool overlooking the ocean discovers a small cemetery, she has no qualms about disturbing the dead.

Not long afterward, Genevieve is shaken when she walks into her young son’s room and finds him conversing with a girl that he claims to see, but she can’t. And we’re off and running with what at first appears to be a classic New England ghost story. Only it’s not.

While there are ghosts in The Cliffs, and a psychic named Clementine who claims to connect Jane with her mother and grandmother, the sprawling story is primarily about human beings who are alive, or once were, and their legacies. Rich in history, it also delves into the lives of indigenous people who named the (fictional) town Awadapquit, and the ethical issues of living on their land. (“What does it mean to acknowledge that this land had been stolen, when no one had any intention of giving it back?” Sullivan writes.)

These are side stories that are so expertly woven into the narrative that they never feel preachy or pretentious.

As the story progresses, Jane returns to her hometown to help clean out her mother’s house, and also to escape fallout from an alcohol-induced humiliation that is also threatening her job and her marriage. Meanwhile, Jane’s friend Allison’s mother, who was a mother surrogate for Jane when she was in high school, is slipping into dementia, and Allison connects Jane with Genevieve, who wants someone to research previous owners of the house.

There’s more than one mystery here: In addition to the spirit that Genevieve’s son thinks he sees, Jane had been told by a psychic that she needed to get a message from a girl identified only by the initial “D” to her mother, assuring her that she is at peace.

Jane, who has a Ph.D. in American history, hadn’t wanted to meet with this medium at all — the visit was a gift, and she is highly skeptical of psychics in general, and bewildered as to why some random child would be connected in any way to her family.

“And by the way, why is it that dead people always come back to tell their loved ones, ‘I’m at peace.’? Why is it never, ‘This absolutely sucks, get me out of here,?’ Jane tells Allison when recounting the visit.

As in every human life, there is so much pain that the characters don’t see, much of it caused by each other.

“Human beings did so much damage to one another just by being alive. To the people they loved most, and to the ones they knew so little about that they could convince themselves they weren’t even people,” Sullivan writes.

We also all have ghosts, real or not, in the sticky shadows of people who have passed and left their mark on us. The Cliffs is a study of family that is deeply affecting, even if you don’t care much for the learning about spirits, like why children are receptive to ghosts (it’s said that they see parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that older people can’t) and what happens at a real-life “spiritualist camp meeting” in Maine (renamed Camp Mira in The Cliffs, but which is actually called Camp Etna).

(Unrelated to spirits, but New Hampshire also has a couple of cameos in here — Jane sneaks across state lines to buy alcohol, and a pivotal event happens while one character is on a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough.)

Lots of dubious writers come to be “New York Times best-selling authors” through marketing campaigns and purchasing gimmicks. The Cliffs is fresh evidence that Sullivan is one by virtue of talent. It is an engrossing and deeply New England novel, with characters that will burrow into your heart. A