The Möbius Book

Novelist Lacey (Biography of X) reflects on love, faith, and loss in this ambitious genre-bender. Reeling after a breakup, Lacey set out to process it with a “Möbius strip of narrative”: the book’s first half is fiction, and the second—printed backwards and upside-down, requiring readers to physically turn the book over—is memoir. In the first, a woman named Edie visits her friend Marie near Christmas. Marie has just noticed a pool of blood seeping from under the door of the neighboring apartment, but the friends merely drink tequila and reflect on their mutual friendship with K, a religious conversation Edie had with a dying dog, and the recent end of Edie’s abusive relationship. Eventually, a cop comes to investigate the blood. The second half sees Lacey pick apart her own breakup: in the wake of an email in which Lacey’s partner told her he met someone else, she recalls her strict religious upbringing, the function of fiction in her life, and her experiences with spiritual healers. Lacey’s writing is at its most vital in the fiction section; the memoir skews trite (“A trust betrayed is always a shock. That is the hazard of trust”). Still, her vulnerable search for answers and insertion of rhyming resonances across the two narratives excite. The author’s fans will be glad they took the plunge. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (June)