Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 272 pages, $26

“Lila” is a wonderful book, but it is not a mystery, although there is, however briefly, a murder in it. "Lila" is a wonderful book about being dirt poor in the same way "Grapes of Wrath" is a wonderful book about being dirt poor. They are hard to read, but you are not sorry you read them.

To my shame I have tried and not finished both “Housekeeping” and “Gilead," also by Marilynne Robinson. When I started “Lila,” I could not stop reading. Its beautiful story ebbs and flows. In the flows, we slowly learn Lila’s back story, before she wound up in the town of Gilead, the same Gilead and the same Lila from Robinson’s “Gilead.” “Gilead” was Lila’s husband’s story, and “Lila” is most certainly hers.

It has been a long time since I thought to myself, upon finishing a book, that I would like to re-read it. Someday I would like to re-read “Lila.”

The Farm by Tom Rob Smith

Grand Central Publishing, 368 pages, $26 (released 6/14)

British author Tom Rob Smith wrote an interesting and compelling series set in 1950s USSR. “Child 44,” “The Secret Speech,” and “Agent 6” are daring works, melding historical events at a tumultuous time in USSR history and the police work of his fictional character, police detective Leo Demidov.

In “The Farm,” Smith ventures into calmer territory. Based on a real-life incident when his mother called him from Sweden for help, Smith begins his fictional story with that premise. Daniel, a young man living in London, receives first a frantic phone call from his father, saying Daniel’s mother has escaped from a psychiatric institution. An institution? Then comes an ice-cold phone call from his mother, Tilde, who has moved back to her native Sweden with Chris, her British-born husband and Daniel’s father. Everyone is lying about her, she says, and there is a conspiracy afoot in Sweden to discredit her because she knows a damning secret about some men, including Chris, in her village. She’s on her way to London.

About four-fifths of the book is slow going because it contains Tilde’s painstaking (and perhaps paranoid) presentation to Daniel of the conspiracy and the evidence she has acquired. At the crux of it is a missing 16-year-old girl, Mia, the daughter of the wealthiest and most influential man in Tilde’s neck of the Swedish woods. Tilde claims Mia has been murdered, and she wants Daniel to help her take her findings to the police in England.

In contrast, the last fifth of the book races along, because it is Daniel’s story of what he finds when he flies to Sweden. Needless to say, I enjoyed this part much more.

This is a well-written book. However. 

Apparently, from the accolades the book has received, most reviewers thought this was a wonderful book. I found Tilde irritating. Her paranoia, however well-based it may be, scraped annoyingly at me. At the same time I could see how well Smith built up Tilde’s story. Painstaking narration, however, is a device that should be used sparingly. If a reader (i.e., me) doesn’t fall for the character, then the four-fifths, or whatever, of a book the author devotes to it will pass slowly.

The Monogram Murders by Sophie Hannah

William Morrow, 320 pages, $25.99

Hercule Poirot is not dead. Agatha Christie may have passed away thirty-eight years ago, but her creation lives on through author Sophie Hannah (with permission from Christie’s family). However, if you are looking for another Poirot book in the style of Agatha Christie, you can fuhgeddabowdit.

Part of what drove me away from Agatha Christie’s books many, many years ago — and eventually drove me back into her literary arms soon after — was how two-dimensional her stories and characters were. Now I find that two-dimensionality comforting. In Christie’s books, there is much “wickedness” and very little ambiguity. Sophie Hannah has added a layer of psychological depth. Instead of wickedness, there is a blanketing darkness.

Écoutez. Poirot is temporarily trying to escape the burden of being Hercule Poirot, retired Belgian detective and current thorn-in-the-side/consultant to Scotland Yard. He has left the comfort of his perfectly aligned home for the suffocating coziness of a boarding house not far from his digs. Of course there is a police detective also in residence, Edward Catchpool, with whom Poirot investigates three (almost) identical murders at a hotel.

Catchpool is no Hastings when it comes to chronicling the activity in Poirot’s “little grey cells.” That is both good and bad. Catchpool and Hastings are equally clueless, both having rather simple approaches to solving a murder, but Catchpool comes with his own mental baggage, which strangely interferes with his duty as a detective of homicides. Christie was lean and tight in her storytelling; Hannah tends, through Catchpool, towards more details and frills.

Whether Hannah will captivate enough readers to continue wearing Christie’s mantle remains to be seen. In the positive column, I could clearly hear David Suchet’s voice whenever Poirot spoke. In the less successful column — if she is trying to emulate Christie — her story lacks the humor and tartness of the original. All in all, by today’s standards, her story has the complexity and psychological darkness to qualify as an emblematic British crime novel.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Alfred A. Knopf, 333 pages, $24.95

“Station Eleven” is a superb dystopian novel, because it is first and foremost about people, not special effects. After a flu epidemic wipes out 99 percent of the world’s population within an astoundingly short period of time, the survivors must do hard and sometimes unspeakable things to survive. But this is not a book with graphic horrors. It is about psychological toughness, optimism, and the will to survive and endure.

The book travels between events before the epidemic and going forward until twenty years after “the collapse.” There are two central characters: actor Arthur Leander, who dies within the first few pages of a heart attack while he is on stage, and child actor Kirsten Raymonde, who had a bit part in the same stage production.

In a series of flashbacks, Arthur’s life is presented as a voyage between wives. As his renown grows, he becomes unmoored and trades his wives in with regularity. Has he ever cared about anyone, including the son he and his second wife produced? Arthur’s death occurs on the eve of the viral cataclysm. 

Kirsten is seven or eight years old at the time of the play. When we next see her it is twenty years after the epidemic. She is now a member of a traveling acting and musical troupe. By horse and wagon the thirty or so people in the troupe travel a circuit in the Midwest, presenting entertainment for the sparsely populated settlements in the area. Although the settlements are fairly stable and non-threatening, there are still dangers from brigands and beasts wandering the area.

As the players enter one familiar town after a two-year absence, they look forward to reuniting with two former members they had left behind when their child was about to be born. Instead of their friends, they find a much sparser population and a reticence among the people who are there. Instead of a mayor, the town is ruled by a mysterious “prophet.” The troupe cannot leave town fast enough.

Back on the road the players begin to suddenly and quietly disappear. Is it the prophet? Or something more sinister or supernatural?

Emily St. John Mandel offers an interesting and thrilling book. Kirsten is a grown-up version of Katniss Everdeen — she’s smart and can hunt and kill — but she’s also close to the little girl she used to be. Arthur had given her a comic book, also named Station Eleven, on that last night, and she has treasured it as a connection to a world she barely remembers and as a imaginative depiction of other survivors in a fantasy world.

Mandel traces the fine threads of connection between the past and the present. She provides knowledge that only we readers will ever know about who some of the present characters really are. (In a charming touch, some of the troupe no longer use their birth names but are referred to by their instruments, e.g., Viola.)

Despite the hazards of the new world, there’s a freshness and renewal — in the air, in the night sky, in a sense of possibilities — that slowly had been driven out of the technology-obsessed world that fell that night twenty years ago.

Mandel has created a book that is wonderful in so many ways. Not without reason, it was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in fiction. She didn’t win that award, but here is an MBTB star.