This book review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on January 27, 2016.

Consider all the loss it is possible to endure: lost wages, lost opportunities, lost objects, lost youth, lost hope, lost minds, lost innocence, lost loves, lost loved ones, the loss of a child. Consider all the ways that we endure that loss, or don’t endure. That, very simply and eloquently, is what Amina Gautier does in her latest story collection, The Loss of All Lost Things.

This is Gautier’s third collection of short stories, after At-Risk and Now We Will Be Happy. Her first won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and her second won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Clearly, her work speaks to readers, and now here is Loss, adding its haunting voice to the others, speaking quietly, powerfully, of the large and small losses in all of our lives.

The collection opens with what is perhaps the most searing of the stories, “Lost and Found,” which is told from the point of view of a young boy who has been kidnapped, snatched up off the street in the brief walk between the school-bus stop and home. The boy thinks of his captor only as “Thisman,” and we are spared all but the barest allusions to how Thisman uses him. What is perhaps more painful is seeing how easily Thisman is able to convince the boy that no one wanted him in the first place and that no one is looking for him. Still, the boy tries to think of himself as lost instead of taken. “Things that are taken are never given back. Things that are lost can be found,” he thinks, and wishes, “If only he could find the Lost and Found and turn his own self in.”

This story is bookended by “The Loss of All Lost Things,” in which we experience this horror from the parents’ perspective. The boy’s sense that his parents were distractedly living above and around him is borne out here, his absence garnering their focus as his presence never could. Then, beyond the misery of helpless waiting and speculating comes the brutal realization that, eventually, life continues on for everyone else.

“Their friends, relatives, and loved ones who wanted them to remain hopeful now want them to admit the worst has come.” And though “they hate each other for their weakness, for the living that muscles through,” the husband and wife only have each other. No one else can possibly understand.

Unexpectedly, the two stories that focus on the parents of kidnapped children are perhaps the most hopeful in the whole collection. In “Cicero Waiting,” the husband and wife already know their 3-year-old daughter isn’t coming back after she disappears in an instant out of his gaze at Target. Though he is unwilling to be forgiven, his wife stubbornly refuses to blame him and continues to reach out to him.

“Could it be that simple?” he wonders. Yes, it could.

Many of the other stories are of more typical losses. For example, a more universal experience of losing a child — that is, of losing the wonderful, loving child you once knew to the ravages of adolescence — is the subject of both “What’s Best for You” and “What Matters Most,” in which a mother tells herself, “It is your fault that you raised a daughter whom you love with a desperation bordering on insanity but with whom you cannot have a civil conversation.” To say that Gautier’s subjects are common or typical, however, does not in any way diminish the power of her stories.

In a nod to writing what you know, Gautier, who teaches at the University of Miami, peoples her stories with professors and graduate students, denizens of the oh-so-insular university universe. She pokes self-aware fun at the world of grad students who “took themselves too seriously” and are trained to think of their world as the only one of any import. When, in “Directory Assistance,” Caroline drops out of that life and winds up training with the phone company, she and her mother celebrate that she finally has a “‘real’ job.”

There is only one story here that doesn’t belong. While the themes of “Disturbance” are squarely in keeping with the rest of the collection, its tone is not. Gautier puts us into another world, describing a group of people that has separated from the rest of society and formed its own small town, Togetherness. This would have been a fine story in a different collection, but here it is a jarring anomaly. Putting the readers’ focus on the unfamiliar mechanics of life in a small, closed community, with its parallels to Shirley Jackson’s classic “The Lottery,” takes us away from the simple details of normal daily living, which by themselves are painful enough.

One of her characters makes this point in “Resident Lover,” in considering his ex-wife’s “weird children poems…they were children meant to make one cry because the poetry could not.” Instead, he feels that “the common pain of childhood — of wanting to be older than you were sooner than you ever could be, of feeling vulnerable and dependent, of waiting for everything, of being devalued — any and all of this was enough, hard enough, good enough for a slew of poems.” It is this capturing of the pain and loss common to everyday living at which Gautier excels.

This book review originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on December 30, 2015.

If you’re familiar with Paolo Giordano because of either of his first two novels, The Solitude of Prime Numbers or The Human Body, be aware that Like Family has little in common with them — little besides the fact that Giordano is the author, and that’s reason enough for his fans to pick this one up, too.

Unlike his previous novels, fraught as they were, this is a slender, tender volume, easily consumed in a single afternoon, possibly while you’re wrapped up in a blanket on the sofa with a mug of tea.

Giordano admits at the outset that this, generally, is a true story, with names and a few salient points changed, but the sentiment he feels for these people is real. It’s also a bit of a giveaway that the first-person narrator is a Ph.D. in particle physics, a characteristic he shares with the author.

This is the story of a young husband and wife who, it is easy to see, are a bit of a mismatch: Nora is creative, messy, and outgoing, while our unnamed narrator is mathematical, precise, introverted, and somewhat pessimistic. His current position is chronically at risk, but she’s unenthusiastic about moving from Italy to Switzerland so that he can accept a prestigious research grant. Then, when Nora’s pregnancy turns high-risk and she is confined to months of bed rest, Mrs. A. enters their lives.

At first they are a bit put-upon by the way she takes over operations, but it isn’t long before they come to depend upon her.

“By the time Emanuele was born, we were too spoiled to give up her attentions. Mrs. A. went from being Nora’s nurse to being our son’s nanny, as if there were a natural continuity between the two occupations, and although she had not cared for a newborn baby before that, she immediately proved to have very clear ideas — much clearer than ours — on what to do and what not to do.”

Mrs. A. has a primary hand in raising Emanuele. She is often mistaken for his grandmother, and the two dote upon each other. He imitates his parents in calling Mrs. A. “Babette,” after the title character from the Karen Blixen story “Babette’s Feast,” because of how central food is to her place in the family. When, after eight years, Mrs. A. suddenly announces her plan to stop coming each day simply because she is tired, the household goes into a tailspin.

The story begins at the end, with Mrs. A’s death, but from there goes forward and back to reveal the physical and emotional details that allow us to see deeply into these lives. In Like Family, Giordano gives in to a tendency to tell rather than to show, but the telling is often so lovely that it’s hard to complain. For example: “In the long run, every love needs someone to witness and acknowledge it, to validate it, or it may turn out to be just a mirage. Without her gaze we felt at risk.”

And, as he gazes on his sleeping wife: “In the end we are almost never happy or unhappy because of what happens to us; we are one or the other depending on the humor that flows inside us, and hers is molten silver: the whitest of metals, the best conductor, and the most merciless reflector. The consolation of knowing that she is so strong mixes with the fear of not being truly indispensable to her, with the suspicion that I might be sucking the life out of her, like a kind of gigantic parasite.”

It seems unfair, to those of us with a smaller talent set, that a guy with a Ph.D. in something as arcane as particle physics could write as beautifully, as tenderly as Giordano often does. On the other hand, we can just be grateful and keep reading.