The Quality of Her Passion

Ibegin with an embarrassing confession. Until this spring, I knew of Kim Echlin as a well-regarded author, but I had never read her. I thought of her as a writer not afraid of difficult topics, whose novels ventured to some of the world’s most troubled places. As for myself (and this is the embarrassing part), when confronted with stories of Bosnia or Cambodia, I’ve inevitably reached for my Penelope Fitzgerald or Colm Tóibín. Not to say that there’s no sadness in Fitzgerald or Tóibín, but they don’t write about genocide. Of course, I was uneasily aware that my reading choices were leaving some excellent books untried, and I decided it was time to leave my well-appointed comfort zone.

The writer Marina Endicott once said that a novelist always tells the same story with different characters, plots, and locations. This may not always be true, but once you’ve heard the theory, it’s tempting to see where it fits. What narrative does Echlin return to again and again? It...