Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

Don’t be fooled by the title of Dan Chaon’s new novel, which has appeared on many best of the year lists for 2009. It sounds like it should be a quiet domestic novel, but in fact it’s a riveting page turner, filled with suspense and dark paranoia. It open with three separate storylines – In the first, a young man is in the back of a car, his severed hand in the cooler next to him. In another storyline, a young woman and her lover, who happens to be her high school English teacher, are fleeing their homes in the Midwest for a mysterious fortune. In the last, a middle-aged man hunts desperately for his schizophrenic twin brother who disappeared ten years ago, destroying their lives in his wake.

These three narratives become one by the book’s end, a meditation on the nature (or absence) of identity in our 21st-century culture. The fragmented personae of the books characters, and the conspiracy theories that drive them to their ultimate destinations, are exhilarating and raw. A truly marvelous book.

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Recommended by Sara D.