"Every telling of an event is a portrait of the teller and not the event itself." And in that case, "The Lost Book of Adana Moreau," with all its many tellings, is a vast portrait gallery. Of the eponymous Dominicana science fiction author, yes, but also of her pirate husband, and physicist son, and a Jewish immigrant, and his grandson, and their friend the freelance foreign correspondent, and a women who combed the desert to recover the bones of people "disappeared" under Pinochet, and a bookseller in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and others. And the events they tell as they paint their portraits! Hauntingly beautiful tales of the multiverse, of stories lost and never written, of lives lived and rarely spoken, of identity and immigration and warfare and survival and wandering and stars and unexpected connection.

Or, if you'd like, this is a literary saga about a book that was written and destroyed in 1929 and yet somehow, in 2004, ends up with a Chicago hotel worker who tries to return it to the author's son in New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katerina.

But, really, it's the portrait thing.

Content notes: loss of parent, colonialism, racism, war, displacement, natural disaster, death, torture