Happiness

January 1, 2018
This elegant novel from Forna (The Memory of Love) opens with a chance encounter: Ghanaian psychiatrist Attila Asare and American urban wildlife biologist Jean Turane collide while walking across London’s Waterloo Bridge. Normally dispatched to war zones for his expertise in post-traumatic stress disorder, Attila is in town to speak at a conference. Jean lives there and researches the city’s foxes. After a second encounter on the bridge, Attila offers to buy Jean a drink at his hotel bar and reveals that he had a secondary reason to come to London: to locate the teenage son of a friend who might have been swept up by immigration officials. Jean volunteers to help and eventually organizes a search to find the young runaway. A diverse cast of supporting characters (many of whom are West African immigrants) and Forna’s rich descriptions of London make the novel potent and immersive. With their professional expertise and contemplative personalities, the protagonists offer wisdom on the nature of cruelty, the fear of the untamable, and the challenge of defining normality. The occasional bit of awkward dialogue and a convoluted plot will strain some readers’ patience. Despite a reliance on coincidence to drive her narrative, Forna’s gift for characterization allows her to ask genuine, practical questions about the delicate problems of the human condition in this ambitious novel.

Starred review from February 15, 2018
The overarching message tucked into Scottish and Sierra Leonian writer Forna's (The Hired Man, 2013) quietly resonant novel is this: every living thing is the net sum of its history, and we carry the weight of our past on our shoulders. Atilla, a renowned Ghanian psychiatrist, is ostensibly in London to deliver a keynote speech, but he also has personal motives. He wants to check in on his friends' daughter, who he worries has come unmoored, and ensure that his first love, struck by early-onset Alzheimer's, is comfortable as she prepares to die. In a chance encounter he meets Jean, an American zoologist who studies urban foxes, and the two cultivate a tenuous relationship. Having specialized in war trauma, Atilla is weighed down by his battle scars and grief and guilt over his wife's early death. Jean is coming to terms with her divorce and a growing distance from her only child. Intricately woven into this tangled web are both the history of urban wild animals and Atilla's experience in war zones, as the story subtly shifts in and out of focus between the past and the present. If at times slightly diffuse, Forna's novel is ultimately a mesmerizing tale studded with exquisite writing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from January 1, 2018
The paths of two people--an American woman who studies the habits of urban foxes and a Ghanaian man specializing in refugee trauma--cross in London, creating a fork in the road for both.Shot through with history, biology, and psychiatry, Forna's (The Hired Man, 2013, etc.) fourth novel is an unusual work that characteristically integrates multiple layers with fluidity. Its central characters are divorced wildlife biologist Jean Turane, in London working for a local council, and noted psychiatrist Attila Asare, a widower, who's arrived to give the keynote speech at a conference. Both have devoted their working lives to interpreting behavior and response, whether human or animal. Jean's context is the American history of settlement, wolf-hunting, and survival; Attila's the international geography of war. One accidental encounter on Waterloo Bridge, when Jean runs into Attila while chasing a fox, leads to more time spent together; meanwhile, Attila is searching for two missing family members and trying to help an old lover now afflicted by early-onset Alzheimer's disease, and Jean is drawn into a metropolitan fox-culling controversy. These far-from-sensational events, spanning some 10 days, are interrupted by more dramatic interludes set in Bosnia, New England, Iraq, and elsewhere, offering glimpses of Jean's and Attila's pasts: work done, risks taken, pain experienced. Forna's sensitive novel is nonostentatious yet compelling, and whether writing of Attila's victims of conflict and terror or Jean's birds and mammals, she offers wisdom and perspective, which is further extended to the possibility of romance between two questing strangers.Low-key yet piercingly empathetic, Forna's latest explores instinct, resilience, and the complexity of human coexistence, reaffirming her reputation for exceptional ability and perspective.

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