How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster

In the mesmerizing, outré debut novel from poet Leung (Imagine Us, The Swarm), New Yorkers adapt to deadly acid rain and ghosts long for their old lives. It’s set in an alternate present, where the rain destroys buildings in New York City and causes fatal burns. As the city goes into lockdown, Mira, the Chinese American narrator, leaves her girlfriend, Mal, in Queens to move back into her mom’s Manhattan apartment. There, Mira launches a ham radio show called How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster, offering relationship advice and hoping to reach Mal through encoded messages, in which she pleads for forgiveness. Intercut with Mira’s narrative are threads featuring other residents in her apartment building, including those living and dead, human and insect. Among them are Mira’s mom’s friend Lucinda, who accidentally conjures a ghost but fails to help others contact the spirits of their dearly departed, and the ghost of a cockroach, who ruminates on his late, noncommittal lover. Meanwhile, Mira starts sleeping with a headless man named Sad, who pines for his dead fiancée. Amid the strangeness of these stories, a picture of genuine longing and unsettling pain comes through powerfully. This is a wildly original, disorienting rumination on love amid chaos. (Oct.)

Correction: A previous version of this review mischaracterized the narrator’s ethnic background.