The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova

 

Alexandra Boyd has come to Bulgaria to teach English and to honor the memory of her brother whose dream had been to come there.  She comes a week or so before her job starts so that she can tour the country and get situated.  The cab from the train takes her to the wrong hotel so she is standing outside it deciding  what to do when she notices some elderly people trying to get into a cab with their possessions.  There is an old man in a wheelchair, a woman the same age and a middle-aged man who is probably their son.  Alexandra goes and helps and in the process, one of their bags ends up mixed in with hers.  The cab has left and she looks in the bag to see if she can find some identification so she can return it.  She is taken aback to see that it contains an urn with cremated ashes and a name, Stoyan Lazarov.

Even more determined to return such a honored possession, Alexandra gets in a cab.  It turns out to be driven by a man who says to call him Bobby and when she explains, he decides to help her return the urn.  Thus are the two drawn into the history of the Lazarov family.  Stoyan had been a violinist around the time of World War II and the taking over of Bulgaria by Russia.  Like many artists, he is declared a criminal working against the government and placed in a labor camp where he almost dies.  

Over the next few days, Alexandra and Bobby go to a monastery, the police and villages from the mountains to the sea.  They find people who know the trio they are seeking and even some relatives but they can't find a trace of the three they are looking for.  Along the way, they find a hidden compartment in the urn in which Stoyan had told his story of the camps and all that occurred there.  Soon they realize that someone else is interested in the urn and the story and will kill to get it.  Where is the family?  Who will end up with the urn?

From the 1940's up to the late 1980's there were over a hundred of these labor camps in Bulgaria.  Although they were said to be operated by criminal labor, most of the inhabitants were merely those the government considered a threat for one reason or another.  Tens of thousands of Bulgarians were confined in these camps.  Elizabeth Kostova is an American author whose three novels are extensively researched.  She married a Bulgarian scholar and in this novel tells the story that was hidden in Bulgarian history.  This is her third and most recent novel, published in 2017, and is recommended for readers of historical and literary fiction.  

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

 

Some love affairs are best never started.  If Paul and Julian had never met, three lives would not have been ruined.  Paul is an introverted young man, just starting college and trying to rebuild his life after his father, who he idolized, dies.  Although Paul is shy, he is also convinced that most people around him are his intellectual inferiors.  He is the only person he knows in his middle class life who loves art and poetry.  His dream is to become a scientist, perhaps studying the butterflies he has always collected.

Julian is the opposite.  From money, he has the assurance and confidence of those who have always been provided for and who know their lives are set up to be a success.  He is also convinced that most people around him don't know how to live the life that he anticipates for himself full of beauty and literature.  He can dismiss others with a word or even a glance.

When these two encounter each other in college, they are instantly drawn together.  Since both are gay, it is not long before they form a romantic relationship.  Paul would do anything to please Julian yet he is the dominant one in their lovemaking.  Julian takes as a project the task of convincing Paul he is as good a person as Julian sees him.  This sets up a relationship where the stakes are constantly being raised as each tries to convince the other that they would do anything for the other and the life they want together.

Unfortunately, that results in their project.  They decide to kill someone who deserves to die to seal their love forever.  They choose someone who was involved in war atrocities.  They spend weeks planning their crime, sure that it cannot fail.  Yet after the crime, things do not go as they had planned.

This is a debut novel and was released to great anticipation in many quarters.  The author, Micah Nemerever, writes that he was these young men, lonely in so many way, offput by most people he met yet yearning for a relationship that could sustain him.  It is also, of course, influenced by such true crime cases as Leopold and Leob and Parker and Hulme.  The reader is drawn into the fevered world of these two men and the bad choices they make as a result of their love for each other.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.