What Roy does here is really cool and, while it takes a while for the interwoven stories to get going (and one finds oneself wondering who the main character is and what the story is at first), the answer becomes clear and one learns to trust in the quote about shattered stories on the back of the book.
The downside of realism is that your ending can never be about the turmoil and the trauma of the state or the people, but always only the persons who are in the story.
Roy is a gorgeous writer and her prose carries the reader through the story in a way that the characters don't necessarily. (Welcome to contemporary fiction, she says drily.) They are neither simple nor poorly drawn, but they can feel like vehicles for the language rather than the language feeling like reflections of them. And the...let us call it world building; the space between creating a universe and bringing the one that already exists to those who live in ignorance of it is not that wide and the best of both kinds of stories share a willingness to let the reader come along for the ride and learn in the process.
It's probably a statement about me and not the book that I feel dissatisfied with stories that end with the oasis of tranquility. That is, after all, a point of the book. #Iwillneverbesatisfied