Red Light Run

The linked stories in this debut collection revolve around a drunk driving accident that ends the life of well-loved Sonia Senn and ironically sends Hartley Nolan—whose wife, Glennis, has a problem with alcohol and who, as explained in “The Intervention So Far,” had been attempting that very night to confront her about it—to prison. Narrated by Sonia and Hartley, along with their parents, siblings, friends, and lovers, these stories interrogate not only the circumstances of the central tragedy but the wide-reaching implications it has on the lives of the network of characters affected by it. In “Time and Trouble,” Hartley’s mother, Kate, imagines how she will usher her son back into society on the eve of his release from prison and is forced to confront her anger toward his newly pregnant wife. In “Patient History,” Glennis reveals her own troubled past and the ways in which she was led down the path toward addiction. The Chicagoland town of Wicklow, where much of the narrative takes place, is under siege by a mysterious species of beetle that is slowly devouring all of the community’s oak trees from the inside out, and the damage wrought by the beetles becomes not only the obsession of Sonia’s late husband, Victor, as he tries to protect the trees growing in the cemetery where Sonia is buried (in “We’ve Lost Our Place”), but also a memorable metaphor for the way grief works on us all. With its impressive range of narrative voices and fully imagined lives of yearning, sometimes desperate characters, this collection marks the arrival of a promising new voice in literary fiction. (Aug.)