New Year

In this wrenching psychological portrait from Zeh (Empty Hearts), a character’s buried traumatic past distorts his memory and loosens his grip on reality. The author locks the reader inside the mind of Henning, a publishing professional who is on holiday on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands with his wife and two young children. Over the course of a solitary bike ride up the steep hills to Femés, Henning labors to fend off what he thinks of as “it”—the uncontrollable panic attacks that have dogged him for much of his adult life. As he struggles for control and begins lashing out mentally at his work, his loved ones, and anything else that could be a potential catalyst, the landscape grows increasingly ominous—and familiar to him. The tale’s startling climax, which reveals the roots of Henning’s neuroses and the unreliability of his perspective, is perfectly executed, with the author adopting a child’s-eye view of past events that is colored by nostalgia and terrifying vulnerability. Zeh’s novel skillfully asks how a person can come to terms with a painful past that has been intentionally misremembered for the purpose of sustaining one’s mental health. Readers, though, will have no trouble remembering this. (Nov.)