Across the landscape of his career, author Chris Bohjalian has written novels about a murderer's plight against a privileged family in World War II Italy, about a young social worker driven into Jazz Age Long Island by a homeless man's photographs, of an American woman's love for an Armenian man in early-twentieth century Syria, and more. In his contemporary classic, Midwives, he tells the unforgettable story of midwife Sibyl Danforth and a home birth gone tragically wrong. Narrated by Sibyl’s fourteen year-old daughter Connie, Midwives is a chilling and evocative account of what one woman will endure for the sake of protecting her name and standing by her choices. When Sibyl Danforth experienced challenges in the delivery of a client’s child, she would have called the hospital and sent for an emergency rescue squad. But in a small Vermont town in the throes of a winter storm, help is an impossible distance away and Sibyl finds herself the only hope of a helpless, unborn child. After the mother has expired, Sibyl takes matters into her own hands and performs an emergency cesarean section to save the child. But what if, as the prosecutors of her court case are determined to prove, the mother had still be alive when Sibyl cut the baby from her? With the sort of harsh but deeply emotive freedom that makes his work so singularly compelling, Bohjalian unravels the story of Sibyl’s journey to clear herself of being labeled a murderer. Is she suffering vulgar mistreatment at the hands of others, or did she truly make an atrocious mistake? There’s something quiet and vulnerable about Sibyl as a character, which makes her no less vivid, but where the novel really excels in its character depiction is in narrator Connie. In Connie we see a strong, determined young woman represented with the same clarity and depth as many of Bohjalian's other memorable characters, whereas Sibyl sometimes seems to be hiding behind a smokescreen (a necessity, I think, if we readers are to form our own judgments of Sibyl's story).

Much like The Double Bind, Midwives plays very steadily on Bohjalian's knack for psychological mischief; through a fairly quiet and unhurried story he seems to know how to guide his reader into a false sense of security before sweeping revelations come in to knock us off our feet. Also as with The Double Bind, I'm left to wonder exactly how he manages to know what to put in and what to leave out. For me, Midwives worked really well from beginning to end; it had me riveted, yet never able to guess exactly how the ending would play out - and then thrown for a few final loops just when I thought I couldn't be caught by surprise.

Additionally, the level of research that Bohjalian undertook to make Midwives such an engrossing novel is quite fascinating. Not only does he explore the details of midwifery in 1980s America with astonishing acuity, but the novel’s two acts documenting the subsequent manslaughter trial include some aggressively researched and impressive court room drama. This is an interesting novel in its many assets and its many areas of strength: once again the narrative carries off of the pages to envelope the reader in the setting, and young Connie – thirty at the time of her narrative, but fourteen in her memories – is as vividly imagined as the midwife at the center of the plot. Bohjlaian has proven himself as a masterful storyteller and as particularly adept at creating multi-faceted, deeply intellectual drama, but Midwives delves also into an element of the profoundly human, glimpsing the vulnerabilities of human nature and exploring the emotional ways in which we deal with those imperfections. At times challenging, often raw in its uninhibited exploration of truth, Midwives relays much heart and determination even amid the most devastating of tragedies.

Midwives was my August pick for the TBR Pile Challenge, and my fourth overall Chris Bohjalian novel. (I've also reviewed The Sandcastle Girls, The Double Bind, and The Light in the Ruins.) I've enjoyed each of his stories so much, and it consistently impresses me how well he writes stories with so much diversity to them; I can't think of many other authors who write about such vastly different times, places, topics, and people - and make them all seem realistic to boot!

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Florence in 1943 is radiating calm before a storm, entirely at the disposal of its German allies whose soldiers spill across the Tuscan hillside with abandon, commandeering art and artifacts as they go. Gradually receiving the brunt of the Nazis' focus are the Rosatis, a family of Italian nobility, and their idyllic estate, Villa Chimera. Here lives eighteen year-old Cristina Rosati, who exists in an otherwise blissful ignorance away from the tragedies of the war until she embarks on a love affair with a young Nazi officer that will ultimately lead her family on a treacherous downward spiral. Branded as traitors for hosting the Nazis, the Rosati family is left to witness their own fall from grace - if they manage to survive the war. Ten years later, police detective Serafina Bettini is investigating the gruesome serial murders of the remaining members of the Rosati family. She’s desperate to solve the mystery before the killer reaches the youngest of the Rosatis: Cristina. As Serafina's investigation leads her further into the scandal of Villa Chimera and its wartime downfall, she realizes that she herself may have ties to the victims, and maybe even to the killer.

Chris Bohjalian's strengths as a writer have consistently captured my attention as I've journeyed through three of his books this year. His latest novel, The Light in the Ruins, carries all the hallmarks I've come to know of Bohjalian's artistry with fiction. As with The Sandcastle Girls, the richly imagined and beautifully researched history brings the era of the story to life in a way that takes historical fiction to an exciting new level. The characters, all portrayed with an intensity and depth that I've come to expect from the author, captured me from the beginning. Despite being a story full of people, one character never blurs with another; they each manage to take on a larger-than-life presence throughout the novel. Cristina's determined spirit in her youth and Serafina's ability to survive a horrific personal tragedy were inspiring; even the disturbing Nazi antagonist Colonel Decher and the villainous murderer at the heart of the story’s mystery compelled my attention at every scene. The Light in the Ruins is also very dedicated to its genre as a murder mystery; an entirely gruesome whodunit that never once feels contrived. The uniqueness that sets it apart, I think, is rooted in the experienced literary talent of the author, and his ability to truly outwit his audience. The novel's narrative alternates from Cristina's love affair with a Nazi in 1944 to the Rosati murders and Serafina's investigation in 1955, with brief and successfully unsettling first-person interruptions from the faceless serial killer posed between chapters. Through the dual story lines Bohjalian finds a way of simultaneously telling his story from front to back and back to front, a device used similarly in The Sandcastle Girls and which I greatly enjoyed. I found myself on several occasions unseating myself as a reader in order to view the story from the perspective of a writer, to examine and appreciate the deftness and intricacy of its construction, something I've had a tendency to do with all of Bohjalian’s work. And yet I’m never distracted from the story. Everything seems to happen all at once, and so far it’s been vastly enjoyable every time.

At the core of the novel, The Light in the Ruins is powerful on many levels. Stepping out of the territory of the plot – the murder mystery – it broadens to touch on the subject of morality and love in, around, and well outside of the war’s reach. At times a gentle homage to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, it captures the passion of youth; but it also examines the beauty of love’s strength in all its manifestation: between husbands and wives, parents and children, friends, partners, and beyond. I saw only the tense literary thriller coming; the emotional complexity left me breathless and a great deal less dry-eyed than I usually am at the final pages of a novel. Graceful and evocative, The Light in the Ruins delivers a romance, murder mystery, and a profound narrative on human nature in one beautifully crafted story.

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Laurel Estabrook is a young social worker in Vermont living under the weight of a horrific experience: she was viciously attacked one evening on a bike ride through a northern wood. With the emotional scars still suffocating her seven years later, Laurel immerses herself predominantly in her work securing safe and comfortable residencies for the homeless. But when her job brings her into contact with an elderly and schizophrenic homeless man named Bobbie Crocker, her life changes in ways she never would have expected. After Bobbie’s death she discovers he had possessed a remarkable collection of photography; negatives that he himself had taken throughout his career as a talented and notable photographer from the late ’50s into the ‘70s and beyond. The photos lead Laurel into the truth of Bobbie’s past, a truth that some people will go to great lengths to keep secret: namely Bobbie’s ties to the infamous history of two Jazz Age socialites from Laurel’s Long Island hometown. Thwarted by Bobbie’s last surviving relatives and questioned even by her closest friends, Laurel is on a race to prove the weight of Bobbie’s legacy once and for all. An astonishing literary thriller, The Double Bind leaves its reader with the sort of breathless reaction that exactly defines why reading can move us in remarkable ways. Among its surfeit of unique markings is the way in which Bohjalian approached the structure of the novel; his pacing manages to defy the typical strategies of the suspense genre, creating a book that’s distinctive and truly surprising. The novel’s first pages throw its reader headlong into the tense energy of Laurel’s tragic experience and the final chapters present a thrill ride one will never see coming, but it’s what happens on the pages in between that I found, on reflection, quite interesting. Bohjalian's eloquent prose and his focus on his protagonist, Laurel, created an unhurried tempo that had me feeling comfortable and at-ease with the reading experience; not what I had anticipated for a thriller. As I wondered why I was turning pages casually, and not with more rapidity, I started to see the finite ways in which Laurel's fixation on Bobbie's legacy gently began to erode her judgment. I understood that I was in the midst of a novel that had very finely crafted layers, but seeing through them was impossible. I was lulled into a false sense of security, perhaps even worried that the novel had failed because I had already easily imagined every way that the story could work itself out – and this is exactly what gives the shattering twist in the novel’s final act the astonishing velocity that it has.

While the structure and execution was fascinating enough on its own, Bohjalian’s use of The Great Gatsby as a device was extremely clever and handled with tremendous care, showing clearly the author’s great reverence for Fitzgerald’s classic novel. It makes the experience of reading The Double Bind a particularly cerebral one for readers familiar with Gatsby’s iconic story. The cast of characters were all engaging, but Laurel will stay with me for a long while most of all; her courage and determination brought her to life as an Amazon, empowering and emotional. I was also moved by the novel's nonfiction attributes: namely the real life Bob Campbell, a man whose life took him from photographing celebrities to seeking aid at a homeless shelter, and whose own photos appear printed throughout the novel’s pages, cast in the reader’s mind as the work of fictional Bobbie Crocker. The Double Bind manages to pay appropriate homage to a remarkable real-life man and an unforgettable classic novel, all the while taking readers on a journey that will have them questioning the very tangibility of reality; it struck me as smart and deeply intentional storytelling from top to bottom.

I won’t go into more details (much as I’d like to) for the sake of avoiding spoilers; but I do recommend this book very highly, and I recommend that readers see it through to the end, because you think you know exactly what will happen, but you have no idea – and it’s a pretty jarring, exhilarating experience.

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In 1915 Elizabeth Endicott, a spirited young American, arrives with her father in Aleppo, Syria, as part of a Boston-based organization whose mission is to aid the struggling survivors of the harrowing Armenian genocide. Amid the throes of World War I, hundreds of thousands of Armenians are being quietly massacred and, stationed at the American consulate in Aleppo, Elizabeth finds herself a rare witness to the tragic circumstances of a civilization being driven out of its own existence. As Turkish soldiers and gendarmes briefly usher in the barely-living women and children who have survived thus far, Elizabeth and her comrades do their best to administer food and medicine and otherwise preserve the preciously frail lives. During her plight she meets Armen, a young Armenian man spared the swift death so many have suffered by working as an engineer for the Germans. Armen has carried the weight of his share of suffering, however, having lost his wife and daughter to the genocide. As Elizabeth and Armen work to overcome the terrors of the world around them they find a connection neither had expected, and their love grows strong even after they’re driven apart. Despite the unimaginable place she finds herself in, Elizabeth is firm in her hope that she and Armen will find their way back to each other. In 2012, novelist Laura Petrosian finds her world turned upside down when a phone call unravels a series of shocking revelations about her Armenian heritage and brings forth a host of secrets that her beloved, enigmatic grandparents took to their graves. As Laura delves boldly into the history of the Armenian genocide she comes to realize the depth of her ancestors’ plight and the many powerful stories of loss, love, and survival which have been lost in time.

As I turned the final page of Chris Bohjalian's fourteenth novel, The Sandcastle Girls, I wondered in fascination how, as a writer and a devout user of words, my mind had managed to overcloud all language with emotion. I never find myself at a loss for words where books are concerned, but The Sandcastle Girls left me with one tiny (albeit very passionate) reaction: wow. Another one came to mind shortly afterward: stunning. With his efforts, Bohjalian has put forth a novel that in many ways transcends description: there’s simply so much to feel in The Sandcastle Girls that what’s left to say almost pales in comparison. He divides the book between two dialogues: that of 1915, which is a third-person narrative in the present tense, and Laura’s first-person, past-tense account of her journey in present-day New York. The reason I note the use of persons and tenses is purely because I found the artistry with which Bohjalian wielded them to be quite fascinating. The two accounts are not noticeably separated, so the author trusts the reader to discern his pattern and grow comfortable with it – a concept that I found daring, and the execution of which I greatly enjoyed. In the way he crafted The Sandcastle Girls, a reader can easily acquire the feeling that Bohjalian has in many ways broken apart the traditional pillars of the novel and rebuilt them as part of his story.

As for the story itself, I was overwhelmingly absorbed in the plight of the Armenian refugees and their American aids through the account of 1915. Beyond the love story of Armen and Elizabeth, Bohjalian illustrates the lives of several other characters, all equally interesting: from Armenian survivors, a young girl and her unanticipated guardian, to German engineers earnestly trying to make a difference, and the passionately dedicated American consul who hopes that someday the world will understand the degree of tragedy as he has seen it. Laura, Bohjalian’s present-day protagonist, also jumps off the page with a warm combination of humor and sadness as she shares her experience of discovery.

Through The Sandcastle Girls the author guides the reader through scenes that evoke every kind of emotion, from the hopeful happiness of a star-crossed romance to the heartbreaking tragedy of the war and genocide. I was alternately beguiled and disturbed at the turn of a page. At the heart of the novel’s success, I think, is Bohjalian’s ability to at once enchant his readers with a fascinating story and educate them on a part of history too often over-looked. The result is a beautiful journey through the fragility of human life and the immortality of will.

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