I Saw a Man

Starred review from March 1, 2015
Accidental deaths in war and at home engender terrible lies and guilt in this highly original, engrossing literary thriller.Michael, a writer, and TV journalist Caroline are in their 30s when they meet, marry, and move to Wales in a love story that is a marvel of freshness and compression-and a delayed subplot in this skillful novel. Welshman Sheers (Resistance, 2008, etc.), also a poet and playwright, actually begins with the recently widowed Michael slowly moving through the next-door home of his new friends in London, where he has moved after his wife is accidentally killed in a Pakistan drone attack. Her death, however, is not "the event that changed all of their lives," an event that is heralded on the first page but then withheld for almost half the book as Michael's search for a borrowed screwdriver becomes an eerily suspenseful exploration of the house. It is constantly interrupted by sections of flashback and ends with another terrible accident. Tension surges again in police and amateur detective work, or in the psychological agony of living with a terrible truth. With smooth shifts of time and place, the author navigates love and friendship, more than one life lost, more than one knot of lies, more than one family shattered. Parallels abound; almost every character seems to have some kind of double in worlds as disparate as Wall Street, war, and publishing. Some key behavior seems questionable, and Michael's glacially slow search next door risks becoming tedious. But these are small faults in the face of such a large talent as Sheers, a resourceful writer with a sharp eye for both the big picture and the lovely detail, such as "tiny women lost in monstrous SUVs, their painted nails clutching the steering wheels like the feet of caged birds."

May 1, 2015
Sheers follows his widely praised WWII novel, Resistance (2008), with a tale set in more recent Great Recession times. In a bucolic corner of London, a married couple befriends a young widower who has just moved in next door. They sympathize with the man, who is mourning his photographer wife killed by American drone fire, not realizing that he will become the person latently responsible for the death of their four-year-old daughter. In this chain reaction tragedy, few characters are left as solely victims or perpetrators. Grief doesn't teach many lessons. The young widower can't appreciate the similarity of his failure to intervene when the four-year-old's life might have been saved to the Las Vegas drone operator's decision not to avert a missile even when he suspected civilians might be in the target area. By setting the story amid the fall of Lehman Brothers and American drone strikes on the Pakistani border, Sheers indicts not only his characters but also the wider culture for the ways in which we shirk culpability. This is less a thriller than a character-driven exploration of the impact of tragedy on individual lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)