ABOVE THE THUNDER

Manfredi charts the disappointments and surprises of the human heart in her stunning debut novel, a complex ensemble character study that revolves around Anna Brinkman, a widowed, 50-ish Boston medical technologist and academic. Anna's busy life is transformed when her estranged daughter—an erratic heroin addict—calls from Alaska and asks to pay an extended visit. Brinkman is already struggling with her responsibilities as a mentor for a support group of AIDS patients, but she becomes totally overwhelmed when her daughter's husband arrives alone and asks Anna to help him raise the couple's wildly imaginative but troubled 10-year-old daughter, Flynn. In a parallel subplot, Anna forges an unlikely friendship with a hostile HIV-positive patient named Jack, who has betrayed his longtime lover, Stuart, by giving in to his wide-ranging erotic appetites with other men. The literary glue that holds this disparate ensemble together is the remarkable Flynn, who loves boxing and Irish dancing, believes in reincarnation and hears spirit voices. She quickly becomes "the dark heart of the nucleus in the cell of Anna's life" and captures Jack's heart in the process, so much so that Anna ends up moving to Maine with them both to form a unique family that eventually includes one of the other characters. To describe the novel as a brilliant, issue-oriented drama shortchanges Manfredi's accomplishments; the medical writing recalls the early works of Ethan Canin, and the combination of smooth storytelling, compassionate and probing narration and imaginative plotting makes for a heady blend, despite a difficult, tragic ending. (Jan.)