Oliver Loving

Stefan Merrill Block

Atlantic, $29.99

One night 10 years ago in West Texas, at the Bliss County Day School dance, a former student called Hector Espina turned up with a hunting rifle and shot four people dead, leaving a fifth, 17-year-old Oliver, alive but apparently brain-dead. This beautifully written novel explores the way such an event goes on affecting the people around the victims, including Oliver's immediate family and a wider circle of characters including the school principal, the tired Texas Ranger, and the mysterious Rebecca. This is a profoundly political novel almost in spite of itself, the plot turning on one of the school shootings that have become so common in the US, and on the deep-seated racial tensions along the Texas-Mexico border. But the implications of these things are left largely unexplored, in favour of a focus on family and on individual, emotional and psychological effects.