This isn’t a book that skates through its many disparate-seeming scenes, but rather unites them in the heartfelt adventure of its protagonist, who begins his year “abroad” as a foreign land to himself and arrives at something like belonging by the end of his story. For all the self-proclaimed ordinariness of its protagonist, My Year Abroad is a wild ride-a caper, a romance, a bildungsroman, and something of a satire of how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. My Year Abroad is an extraordinary book, acrobatic on the level of the sentence, symphonic across its many movements-and this is a book that moves: from the quaint, manicured town of Dunbar (hard not to read as a Princeton stand-in, where the author taught at the university for many years) to buzzing Shenzhen to a Chinese bazillionaire’s compound, governed by a particularly barbaric modern feudalism back to a landlocked American exurban town deemed Stagno, where the protagonist (the appropriately named, rudderless Tiller) has shacked up with a 30-something woman and her savant kid, both of whom are hunkering down because they’re quite probably part of the witness protection program. Marley Marius Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu
(A poet as well as a novelist, O’Connor has a musical ear for language Joyce and Nora never seem to lose their lilt.) Yes, literati like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, and Sylvia Beach make requisite appearances, but Nora is principally the story of a Galway girl and her “Jim,” eking out some semblance of an existence far from home. Joyce’s drinking and uselessness with money form a throughline, as do their constant moves between Italy, France, and Switzerland. His companion for 37 years (and the mother of both his children), Nora has long sat at the center of Joycian lore she was the model for Ulysses’s Molly Bloom and, in her youthful trysts, inspired two characters in “The Dead.” With Nora, O’Connor leans into that context-as she does into Joyce’s famously filthy letters to his “wildflower of the hedges”-depicting a relationship as lousy with passion as it was with chaos. She takes the same approach in Nora, a long but lively portrait of James Joyce’s wife and muse, Nora Barnacle Joyce. In her fiction, Nuala O’Connor has often explored the private lives of historical figures she did it in 2015’s Miss Emily, about Emily Dickinson, and in 2018’s Becoming Belle, about singer and dancer Belle Bilton.
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