A Thousand and One Nights

Cruise ship entertainers fall in and out of love as they take their act from the seas to exotic luxury hotels in Tupper's promising debut. Karla, fresh out of music school, is thrilled to land a job that pays her to sing, dance and travel. When she performs with Jack, a 29-year-old British guitarist, they click, and soon they're going on dates in the passenger dining room, taking lazy off days on sandy beaches and sleeping together in Jack's tiny bunk while his cabin mate slumbers. They abandon the seaboard life to form a duo, but demeaning gigs playing covers in hotels in the United Arab Emirates and Shanghai deaden their passion and turn Jack into a boozer and Karla into a resentful musical hack. The novel, set in the 1990s, feels mustier than it should, and though the plot loses momentum as the depressed protagonists meander through countless bars on their trip to splitsville, Tupper proves herself a canny observer of the insular world of nomadic entertainers. (Feb.)