Pictures of You

You'd think you'd know where a novel that begins with a fatal highway collision is headed, but, in the case of Caroline Leavitt's hypnotic novel about how the inscrutibilty of fate is humanized by love and forgiveness, you'd be wrong—and glad to be proven so.

June 19: On this day in 1816, the Shelleys, Lord Byron, and entourage gathered at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva to tell the ghost stories that would trigger Frankenstein. This most legendary of storm-tossed evenings inspired…

Very few debut novels exhibit the charm, assurance, emotional depth and bravura fabulation which the lucky reader will discover in Helene Wecker's

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