N.M. Kelby

Even for an astrophysicist, Lucienne lives in a world overfilled with black holes. The heroine of N.M. Kelby’s second novel, Theater of the Stars, has just had the biggest success of her career, finding one of the mysterious, light-eating spatial anomalies. But the rest of her life is a case study in entropy. Her marriage is falling apart and, worse, her mother Helene has just tried to kill herself, threatening to take important secrets to her grave. Things like who Lucienne’s father is, and what happened during the three-year gap between Helene’s escape from Nazi-occupied Paris and her reappearance at Los Alamos, where she helped build the atomic bomb. Which is the sort of enigma that would tantalize just about anybody, really. Kelby’s meditation on war, grief, and family love is sometimes improbably plotted but poignant, and a worthy followup to the well-reviewed In the Company of Angels.