Shadow Man

After Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad, Fleishman tackles the disquieting tale of 52-year-old James Ryan, a former foreign correspondent beset by Alzheimer’s—unable to create new memories and doomed to remember the year his mother died when he was 15. James’s welfare depends on his half-sister qua nurse, known only as “the woman in white,” and his Polish wife, Eva, whom he met in a bar in Poland after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and who once served as his translator. While an increasingly exasperated Eva tries to revive James’s memory by relating his years as a journalist, his devoted half-sister narrates the summer James cannot forget. Shortly after James’s mother died, his father, Kurt, met an “enchanting” woman named Vera, who played host to a destructive paranoia. She carried a pistol as protection against a possibly imagined stalker, whom she referred to eerily as “the man from Marrakesh.” James, Kurt, and Vera embarked on a trip to Virginia Beach where James flirted with marijuana and the hotel clerk, but things took a dramatic turn for the worse when “the man from Marrakesh” tragically manifested. Vibrant prose and masterful shifts in narrative temporalities make this psychological-noir a must-read. Agent: Sorche Fairbank. (Aug.)