Atlas of Unknowns

By Tania James
Knopf, $24.95, 320 pages

This bold novel will hold you captive. Tania James, its author, will make you envious of her skill at filling every page with beauty. Her paragraphs burst with sensory details, precise metaphors, poignant imagery, and delightful humor. You will feel colors and smells, and grasp the desires of the characters. The narrator of the story has a youthful but insightful voice, full of wisdom-a voice that stuns the reader with its clarity.

Atlas of Unknowns is the story of two sisters, Linno and Anju, driven apart by deception and quiet complicity. Despite the rupture of their bond, they are driven on by a sense of duty, that inevitable service one must render out of love, however one conceives of it. Anju leaves her home in India’s Kerala State for the promise of a different life in New York. She discovers that this new life is about much more than economic gain or personal advancement. Though miles apart and on different paths, both sisters find the same truth: Life is about negotiations. This novel gives us two young women who learn the power of individual choice. In the end, they make choices that are an embracing of true autonomy and happiness. Beautifully done!

Reviewed by Viola Allo