There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. A satisfying thriller.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. With the telling use of sensory detail (the smell of chocolate and burning presages the dreadful fire that starts with a birthday cake) and arresting images (Zoe Louise begins appallingly to disintegrate as the time of her threatened death approaches), Conrad builds a spellbinding tale, with suspense and horror enough to make readers overlook any minor lapses of logic and forget to wonder just how the supernatural events have changed present-day Zoe. Finding an old newspaper account of Zoe Louise's death, Zoe is desperate to prevent it and eventually does so-whereupon all traces of the alternate past are obliterated and Zoe Louise's visits cease forever. There, Zoe becomes a ghost seen only by Zoe Louise. From early childhood, Zoe plays with Zoe Louise, whom no one else can see eventually, Zoe discovers that she can enter Zoe Louise's 100-years-ago world by going up the unused back stairs.

Zoe lives with her grandparents her vacant-eyed mother, who found Zoe's name on a crumbled local tombstone, turns up only for occasional unsatisfactory visits. A 20th-century child intervenes in a 19th-century tragedy involving the ghost who has been her frequent companion and friend.

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