It’s an incredibly busy, yet deliciously heady time as we head into our fall sales conference; piles of manuscripts are literally hitting our desks on a daily basis. I’m particularly excited about a new novel called Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital. In fact it may be the very first book I’ve ever read that made me immediately go out and buy a music CD (Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Eurydice plays continually in the background of this novel).

Orpheus Lost is set mostly in Boston, in a contemporary America where several more terrorist attacks have taken place. Leela Moore, an academic doing complicated research into the mathematical relationships in music, first meets Miska in the subway, where he is playing his violin. They embark on a passionate affair but she becomes disturbed by Miska’s silences and the odd way he has of disappearing for short periods of time.

Citizens are continually being investigated for possible ties to terrorist activities, and one night Leela finds herself picked up by a car and taken to a locked room. However, she doesn’t know that the key interrogator is Cobb, an old friend of hers from childhood who, after a stint with the army in Iraq, now works for a private security company. When Miska goes missing for real, Leela desperately turns to Cobb for help, not realizing that he has secrets and traumas of his own to deal with.

This is a richly complex literary novel. On the one hand it’s a beautifully written, sensual, blush-inducing love story, that also tackles the very personal search for identity within a fragmented world. And yet it is also a gripping, suspenseful thriller that is extremely perceptive and probing, not just about contemporary global anxieties but also about how humans cope daily with the destructive effects of war through the generations. An absolutely terrific read!

The Culprits begins innocently enough when Hank, a lonely computer operator in Toronto, searching for love on the Internet, finds Anna, a young Russian woman who, quite unexpectedly, is more than happy to meet him. What blossoms in time is an interesting relationship where both partners must fumble through their respective pasts in order to cobble together their best possible future.

There is definitely an iron fist (curtain?) at work inside the deceptive velvet (revolution?) glove humour of this book. The ongoing war in Chechnya and its related terrors are visited on these and many other characters in very deep, very personal ways. For instance, when Anna cons a very agreeable Henry into paying a ransom to free “an old friend,” he inadvertently supports an awfully fiendish, dreadfully bloody act of violence.

Along the way there, particularly in the last 50-odd pages, there are some head-spinningly-good epiphanies as the book takes a more serious tone.

Robert Hough writes with fantastic irony and a sense of humour that fans of Douglas Coupland and Kurt Vonnegut will find familiar and yet refreshing. I really enjoyed it and I can’t wait to see it on shelves soon!