In The Leftovers, Perrotta puts human relationships under a microscope, sometimes to chilling effect. The town of Mapleton has never stopped reeling after the Sudden Departure, when large numbers of random people simply vanished into thin air. When the smoke clears, those left behind not only grieve for their friends and family who are suddenly gone, but also wonder why they were spared (or not spared). Cults are formed, hate groups emerge, and others just try to pick up where they left off.
After the Event, people see the dead. They are as normal to life as breathing now, but Veronica wishes that life would return back to the way it was before. Now, the ghosts are becoming stronger and they want to return to their lives and become part of the living again.
Hannah is haunted. Her best friend Lillian—still thin and wasted from the anorexia that killed her—follows Hannah around, commenting on her fake friends, her occasionally grisly job processing police photographs, and especially Finny Boone, a seemingly dangerous boy with a kind heart that Hannah can’t help but be drawn to.
This sometimes drawn-out tale revolves around the life of Dorothy Nicolson and her family. It moves between present day, 1959 and 1942. Chapter headings help the reader keep track of the time frame. Dorothy is dying and her daughter, Laurel, wants to learn the reason for a murder she saw her mother commit in 1959. She tries to talk wit
Psychologist Chris Kelvin, played by George Clooney, arrives on a spaceship near the planet Solaris to investigate why the crew is suffering. Kelvin has a vivid dream of his deceased wife his first night on the ship and then discovers her lying next to him after wakening.
With interwoven recipes and memories, Molly Wizenberg divulges her story, a memoir that blossoms from a blog she created in the aftermath of her father’s death.
At the end of the Victorian period, Edward Moon is a stage magician and detective whose fame is fading away. Trying to restore his former glory, he and his assistant, the Somnambulist (fancy name for sleepwalker), get caught in a twisted, nightmarish mystery where nothing is quite what it seems.
With The City & the City, China Miéville has created a fascinating, exciting story that takes a premise that could have come straight from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges and turns it into the kind of hardboiled detective story Borges would have loved.
