Or there is the execution of a man in a forest of metal trees, with plastic leaves. One killer ’s gun jams, and the man on the ground—a former executioner—tells him to look in the barrel so he can spot any obstruction more clearly and then pull the trigger several times. It’s a world Kafka could embrace. The key locations are a meadow in Chechnya and Kirovsk, stories set between 1937 and 2013. The stories focus primarily on a group who grew up in the Siberian town, memories of a nickel-producing, heavily polluted landscape that somehow nurtured them well enough to live in and sometimes succeed in a country undergoing profound change. The other unifying feature is a nineteenth -century painting of the same Chechen meadow, subsequently mined, a place haunted by the deaths of a wife and child sent there to avoid the ravages of urban warfare. The husband repairs a hole in the painting and places two shadowy figures there. The painting pops up in the living room of a former Miss Siberia, from Kirovsk, who gives it to a childhood friend, in memory of his brother who also died in that meadow. Thus, three stories become improbably, though naturally, related. As characters loop into one another’s stories, some readers may be troubled. Others, fond of the characters, want their joining. Perhaps Anthony Marra is a failed postmodernist, afraid to acknowledge the futility of our striving; perhaps he is a skeptical humanist who knows our stories will inevitably reveal some common bond, even in the last words of an executioner to his victim. I stand undecided, but impressed and moved. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Ashley Mayne. Tiger. New York. Dr. Cicero Books (SPD Books, distr.). 2015. 400 pages. Ashley Mayne’s second novel, Tiger, is a wonderfully empathetic look into the hearts and minds of profoundly damaged people. The novel plunges us deeply into the lives of its two central characters. Tony, heir to a large fortune, is a freelance photographer living in Brooklyn who encounters a feral girl on his way home one night. He takes the girl in, fighting against his own base impulses and the girl’s advances. Ochoa is a priest struggling with loneliness and his lust for the boys who populate the Catholic school where he is employed. The characters converge in the past, Mayne brilliantly weaving the time-jumping dual narratives into a readable, compelling story. Tony and Ochoa had a brief relationship when Tony was a boy attending the school. In the present day, Tony discovers that Ochoa has died. This sets in World Literature in Review 64 WLT JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2016 motion the two men’s stories, the chapters alternating between Ochoa and Tony, their similar histories of abuse and neglect, their complex romantic relationship. There isn’t a character in Tiger who is not in some way damaged, and more often than not that damage is of a sexual nature. At its heart, the novel is about regret, guilt, and very human characters learning how to live with themselves. It is about the transference of trauma and how we deal with it, whether we transfer it ourselves. The most fascinating moments come when Mayne directs her intensely empathetic and detailed eye on the inner struggles of the characters, most notably a harrowing scene in the Indian jungle involving the priest and a tiger. The issue with the novel, the frustrating bits, are that Mayne is so talented that she does not turn this kind of language off when describing even the most mundane actions. The same skill and poetry that will make your heart break when applied to the difficult inner lives of the characters will have you screaming for mercy when applied to a character taking a walk down a cold street in Brooklyn at night. Every detail lovingly rendered, expanded upon, and then expanded upon yet again. This Russian nesting doll–style of prose is both the novel’s blessing and curse, at points taking us to high moments of literary bliss and in others, as the author puts it, “wander[ing] in ever-widening circles, like a horse dragging...