The Woman Who Lost Her Soul - Bob Shacochis

Bob Shacochis’s The Woman Who Lost her Soul (Atlantic Monthly, $28) is a complex and multi-layered novel, full of intrigue, romance, politics, and unforgettable characters. When a woman is found apparently murdered on a roadside in Haiti, her identity is revealed to be that of the daughter of a high-ranking U.S. government official. In telling the stories of both father and daughter, Shacochis takes us to the final days of World War II in Yugoslavia, to clandestine affairs in Istanbul, and into the chaos and squalor of Haiti after the 1991 coup, creating a world where identities are slippery and nothing is quite what it seems. Besides being a great story, this book is an intelligently nuanced take on power and politics in the second half of the twentieth century.