The Story of H

Spanish author Perezagua’s audacious novel, the first of her works to be translated into English, epistolizes an intersex woman’s quest to find her sanity, her sex, and a family to replace the one incinerated by the Americans at Hiroshima. H, a child whose parents chose to see her as a boy even though she identified as a girl, survived Little Boy, the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan. After being adopted by a family in America, she tells of meeting Jim, a veteran searching for Yoro, a girl delivered into his care in the aftermath of the war. Together they travel the world, hunting for the child. When Jim dies, H becomes involved with a professor she calls Irrational Number, but she is so psychologically damaged that their relationship soon ends in a surprising, abrupt manner. She continues the search for Yoro, so bound to the idea of her that she narrates as if pregnant with the girl, though she knows she is not. Following a lead years after she first began searching for Yoro, H travels to Africa, where she divulges a startling confession and is involved in a violent crime. Inventive if often didactic, this ambitious book plunges with courage into the moral morass of a horrific period in history. (Aug.)