Tomas Hachard

Much in the seventh novel by Emily St. John Mandel will feel familiar to her readers: An inexplicable disappearance that reverberates across decades. People searching for home or comfort after traumatic loss. Jumps in time and shifts in perspective. The accumulated familiarity is enough that, when I read it, I observed for the first time a formulaic tendency in Mandel’s…

A horse growing out of a flowerpot. A man unbound by gravity holding his wife in mid-air, their “weight balanced.” Another horse, this time rotting on the front lawn of a ranch. These are just a few of the mesmerizing images that Tomás Downey includes in Diving Board, the first collection of his…

According to Statistics Canada, 17 percent of those serving in the military are between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four. Half are thirty-four or under. This reality about the army — that it is a young person’s game — underlies Juiceboxers, the debut novel from the poet and veteran Benjamin Hertwig. Writing about the war in…

Emily St. John Mandel’s novels often feature a moment of disorientation — a brief shift in point of view from the third to the first person, for instance, or a quick jump in time — that unsettles a stable reality and leaves the reader suddenly adrift. Her latest work, the layered and dazzling Sea of Tranquility…

We pick up the story of Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel near the end. The year is 2018, and Vincent, a woman who lives a nomadic life on a shipping freighter, has gone overboard, “plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s wild darkness.” She will form the central thread through this wandering narrative that wears its flightiness on its…