The Departed

During the spring of 2003, the unnamed narrator of Ellis Scott’s Night Terminus travels to a hillside town in the Western Himalayas. He grows close to a Dutch-born Buddhist monk, Rudolph. Their mutual friend, Gloria, explains that she has known the “fit, distinguished-looking man in his sixties” since the 1980s. She was working as a nurse on the front lines of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in San Francisco when Rudolph brought his boyfriend, Paul, to her clinic. “He stopped talking about the past,” she says, describing Rudolph in the months after Paul’s death. “When there are no words to describe something, it’s easier to stay silent.”

Scott’s short, affecting novel consists of five disjointed chapters, each one named after a different man. It begins with the narrator’s memories of Paris in February 1985: “I had buried seven friends that year and there were still ten months to go.” As time passes, we learn relatively little about his childhood, except that he ran...