No Country

This sprawling second novel from Ray (Eastwords) offers a compelling answer to a primal question: where do I come from? It opens with a murder in upstate New York in the 1980s, then flashes back to western Ireland in 1843, just before the Great Famine. From Sligo, two close friends—brash Padraig Aherne and studious Brendan McCarthaigh—each embark on gruelingly long journeys and very different lives. Padraig, through an unlikely series of events, travels to Calcutta, where he establishes a lasting friendship with the Mitra family. Meanwhile, Brendan settles down in the U.S. after a harrowing Atlantic crossing. Ray goes on to trace their descendants’ intertwined paths. Readers fond of Salman Rushdie’s subcontinental epics should appreciate Ray’s combination of multigenerational saga and historical canvas, taking in the potato famine, the partition of India, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Ray vividly illustrates the sentiment one of his characters puts down in a letter: “We all stand at the same great isthmus in the geography of time. We are all related: Our mortality is our one common nation.” Agent: Elizabeth Sheinkman, WME Entertainment. (June)