I love narratives where the past, a past, any past, comes screaming into the present. It doesn’t matter if what happened is relevant to the heroes of the story or deeply woven into their family tree — it is their problem to face and they have to contend with it now. “The past is never dead” and all that.
In The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James, famous actor Jaime Sonoro answers a knock on his door in 1964. A book is shoved into his hands by a mysterious woman, detailing his family’s history from their illustrious Spanish pedigree to their colonial settlement of Mexico. It’s pretty fortuitous. Sonoro is writing a script for a Western based on his grandfather’s 1895 attempt to rob a train in Texas and his odyssey returning home across the Rio Grande. But there are some serious sins exposed, and it comes with a heavy inherited curse. Each generation is followed by the spirit Remedio, who seems out for retribution. Gonzalez James explores deep historical themes within an action-packed page-turner.
In Valérie Perrin’s Forgotten on Sunday, Justine Neige, a 21-year old aide at a nursing home, hardly knows anything about her family’s history. Raised by her grandparents (her mother and father died in a car crash), they never liked to talk about the past. The residents of the nursing home help fill the gaps. She loves to listen to their stories, reveling in their adventures, careers and past loves. She is especially taken by Hélène Hel, who reveals that her lover disappeared sometime during World War II. Justine begins to record Hélène’s story, but in learning about regret and loss, she finds inspiration to confront what really happened to her parents. As always, Perrin surprises in her explorations of buried family secrets.
In Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment, the past seems more like a circle. Steeped in a shared unshakeable faith, Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay don’t feel they belong to their small English village or their small Baptist church. While decades apart in age, they bond through turning their eyes to the past, and more importantly, the cosmos. It’s 1997 and Hart, a newspaper columnist for the Essex Chronicle, is told by his editor to write about the comet Hale-Bopp. This assignment leads Hart down a rabbit hole. He develops a new love of physics, and more importantly, an obsession with a local astronomer who vanished a century ago. The need to solve this mystery stretches and strains the relationship of Thomas and Grace — two people in orbit.
You can argue with yourself about what is the gravitational pull. It is a splendid book.
Find these and other great reads at the Iowa City Public Library’s Staff Picks: icpl.org/picks.
Anne Mangano is the collection services coordinator at the Iowa City Public Library. She couldn’t imagine a life without books. This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2024 issue.
