Dear readers, I’ve lived in New York City for almost 13 years now. And while Jennifer Lopez might beg to differ, after more than a decade I do consider myself a fully fledged member of the community. I have my local spots where the bagel guy knows my order. I can pinpoint exactly which subway door to sit by for the most efficient exit at my stop. I nurse emotional scars from the loss of dearly departed neighborhood joints. I am, at this point, a decidedly urban creature. Still there are days when the train is particularly packed or the trash particularly pungent that I’m tempted to hightail it far away, to some remote corner of the world with more livestock than bars of cell reception. Then reality sinks in: I have a lease, and a job, and a bone-deep love of this utterly unique town. So instead of hitting the road, I pick up a book. There’s something deeply romantic (and Romantic) about a hamlet nestled in a rural expanse — the promise of a quieter, simpler life. But there can also be something a bit sinister. I particularly love mysteries set in remote locations because they capture both sides of this coin: the stark beauty of being far from civilization, and the claustrophobia that can develop when you know every one of your neighbors. There is no anonymity in a village: Everyone’s business is everyone’s business. And when something disrupts that ecosystem, the tides of hysteria or prejudice can quickly sweep up a community in their wake. These novels contain it all: the dark and the light. —Jennifer “The Wonder,” by Emma DonoghueFiction, 2016
When Lib Wright arrives in Athlone, a tiny town at the dead center of Ireland, she is dripping: not just with the Midlands’ perpetual drizzle but with a city dweller’s disdain — for the cart transporting her, for the wan people lining the road, for the spirit grocery (essentially, a mid-1800s liquor store) where she’s meant to sleep, really for the entire Irish nation and its people. To be fair to Lib, she has reason to be skeptical. A nurse who trained with Florence Nightingale, she has been dispatched to Ireland to observe Anna O’Donnell, an 11-year-old girl who (her family claims) has not eaten in four months, subsisting solely on “manna from heaven.” A miracle like this would be quite a coup for a village like Althone, hungry for the tourism money that pilgrims would bring. So a local committee has hired Lib and a nun, Sister Michael, to keep watch over Anna for two weeks and determine what is actually going on with the child. Lib is prickly, pragmatic and not always kind; walking into the O’Donnells’ home for the first time, she assumes Anna’s mother has “coached the brat in the best means of hoodwinking the Englishwoman.” But the more time she spends among the low green fields — and with Anna herself, who is far sweeter than she anticipated — the shakier her convictions become. Is Anna’s survival actually a miracle? Or is this a story the villagers have chosen to believe, because the truth is far worse? Donoghue ratchets up the stakes in unfussy prose shot through with dark humor, historical detail and occasional moments of sublime beauty. (Like Stephen King, who reviewed it for us, I was struck by how “a cloud loosely bandaged the waning moon.”) The book did not squelch my desire to explore the real Irish countryside, but I will be stuffing a few extra granola bars in my bag before I do. Read if you like: “The Keeper,” by Tana French; “Small Things Like These,” by Claire Keegan; “The Banshees of Inisherin”; a generous schmear of Kerrygold on a slice of soda bread. “Disappearing Earth,” by Julia PhillipsFiction, 2019
On the surface, Phillips’s debut novel might sound like a straightforward abduction thriller: Two sisters, 11-year-old Alyona and 8-year-old Sophia, are kidnapped in broad daylight from a beach in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, lured by a man into his shiny black car under the pretext of a sprained ankle. But as the months since they vanished roll by, the story expands into a portrait of a community — specifically the region’s women, including the girls’ mother, Merina, who never stops searching for them; Oksana, the one person to witness the crime; and Alla, an Indigenous woman whose own daughter’s disappearance remains unsolved. Phillips spent a year in Kamchatka researching the novel, and her intimacy with this wild, rugged land and its people infuses every page. The rocky beaches, hissing hot springs and looming mountains feel as fully alive as the men and women who live on this spit of earth that dangles like a hangnail off the edge of the continent. There’s a precariousness to the place; in the book’s opening scene, Alyona tells her little sister the story of a town that vanished off the coast near where they stand, every house and its occupants swept out to sea by a tsunami. And it’s not just natural disasters that loom. Climate change, dying industries, urban migration: Any one of these could be the thing that washes it all away. As much as this book is about fragility, it’s also about survival. No matter how many people tell her that her daughters must be dead, that some mysteries will never be solved, Merina refuses to give up. “Without her girls, all she had was this breathlessness,” Phillips writes. “Terrible as it was — and it was, it was — it was all she had left to mother.” And the women of this community get right down in the dirt with her and keep digging. Read if you like: “The God of the Woods,” by Liz Moore; “The Hounding,” by Xenobe Purvis; Scandi noir shows; “Dept. Q.” We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
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