DESIRE

In direct, visceral prose, debut novelist Ahl investigates the power of memory and the mystery of lovers and parents. Using Kenya, New York City, New Mexico and her narrator's complex inner landscapes as backdrops, Ahl combines rich sensory and geographical descriptions with a tale of psychological and emotional displacement. Petroglyph researcher Elena Monroe has difficulty concentrating when she's with her lover, Michael. During sex, she is deluged with memories of Africa and the elephant slaughters she witnessed as a child, and notes that since falling in love with Michael she's held back, "trying to not feel, trying to forget that I want him, want life, want to live." When her mother, an ambitious but emotionally distant photojournalist also named Elena, visits unexpectedly, Elena the younger is further plunged into a deep and sometimes preciously documented state of confusion. She'd told Michael her mother died, and she seems invested in the fiction herself ("I've always told everyone: my mother died in Africa in 1975" but "I was only telling it the way it was for me, not for the world"). At the same time, she's received a letter from her mother's ex-boyfriend Forester telling her that the land where her memories lie will soon be sold to the Kenyan government. Estranged from Michael and increasingly vulnerable to the onslaught of the past, Elena returns to Forester's home in hopes of clarifying her history. Some of Ahl's resolutions and plotting may feel a bit pat, her prose at times a little too self-consciously swooning, but she is clearly intimate with all the terrain here—from the dusty clog of Africa to the tangle of love and memory. (May)