Thrust into this mysterious way station is Nora Seed, a depressed and desperate woman estranged from her family and friends. How far would you go to address every regret you ever had? That’s the question at the heart of Haig’s latest novel, which imagines the plane between life and death as a vast library filled with books detailing every existence a person could have. The pathos inspired by the sheer scale and indiscriminate nature of pandemic death is almost overwhelming, especially given current events.Ī coming-of-age story that hits a bit closer to home than Wiseman may have intended.Īn unhappy woman who tries to commit suicide finds herself in a mysterious library that allows her to explore new lives. Reading the novel in the time of COVID-19 adds an even greater resonance, and horror, to the description of the fatal spread of that 1918 flu. Wiseman’s novel raises relevant issues about what it means to be an American and about the forms that anti-American sentiment can take in times of crisis the setting during a pandemic, however, one can assume was less intentional. Determined to escape and find her brothers if they are still alive, Pia fights to survive as Bernice embarks on a lucrative business of selling orphaned babies to families who have lost children. At the same time, Pia is taken to an orphanage, at which point things become very Dickensian. Bernice, driven to the brink of suicide by the recent death of her infant son, is distrustful and resentful of the immigrants who have moved into the neighborhood. Meanwhile, neighbor Bernice Groves finds Pia’s brothers crying in their hiding place and chooses to take them with her. Foraging from apartment to apartment in the impoverished, immigrant-populated neighborhood, Pia faints from illness only to wake up several days later in a church hospital ward. When her mother dies, Pia must leave the apartment to find food, and she makes the difficult choice to hide her brothers away to keep them safe until her return. The danger is particularly high in the overcrowded slums where 13-year-old Pia Lange lives with her German mother and baby brothers as her father fights for the U.S. One day, crowds gather at a victory parade in Philadelphia, and soon after, people are dying by the hundreds from the Spanish flu. September 1918: The war is finally coming to an end. A young woman endures incredible loss and tragedy, then fights to find her missing siblings and bring a criminal to justice against the backdrop of the Spanish flu epidemic.