The Unmade World

October 23, 2017
In Yarbrough’s intricate and satisfying novel (after The Realm of Last Chances), the lives of two ordinary men intersect during one winter night in Poland. Richard Brennan is an affable, middle-age American journalist whose chief problems are the vagaries of the newspaper business and his apartment building’s lack of elevator. A fateful night in December 2006 finds him decorating a Christmas tree with his daughter and then heading to dinner with his wife and in-laws. Meanwhile, the kindhearted but unlucky Bogdan Baranowski, defeated by the shuttering of all but one of his chain of grocery stores (not to mention his near-wordless marriage), plans to rob a wealthy developer to save his last store from bankruptcy. Richard and Bogdan are unexpectedly drawn together when a car accident on a snowy road outside Krakow alters both men’s lives and links them permanently. The story tracks Bogdan and Richard through the following years, revealing how both come to grips with that night, grapple with their senses of self, and cope with the repercussions of long-held guilt. Yarbrough crafts intriguing subplots involving a murder investigation and property crime, set against a backdrop of 2016 politics. Though the prose is straightforward, the characters are compelling and the narrative steers clear of easy moralizing or predictable endings.

October 15, 2017

Both meditative and engaging, this new work from Yarbrough (The Oxygen Man), winner of the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence, travels between Poland and California as it examines the consequences of a terrible accident one snowy night near Krakow. American journalist Richard Brennan had been traveling home from family Christmas activities with his Polish wife and their daughter, Anna, when they're driven off the road by petty criminals Marek and Bogdan, desperate to escape from a botched robbery. Former proprietors of a chain of stores forced out of business in post-Communist Poland, these two now lead a marginalized existence, and Yarbrough deftly paints the travails of a rapidly changing society, in which fancy cars swarm the streets and only educated youth need apply for jobs. Richard, too, is going through some job adjustments, and now he must deal with grief as well. This novel of changed times and changed lives hangs on the vagaries of fate, touching on issues from the refugee crisis to corruption in college sports while rolling out the quiet suspense of whether justice will be served. VERDICT Rich with issues of guilt, grief, and cultural dislocation; an accomplished work that's good for book groups.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2017
Despite graphic deaths and a variety of police cases, Yarbrough's 11th work of fiction (The Realm of Last Chances, 2013, etc.) is less a murder mystery than an exploration of how abruptly lives can go off the rails.In 2006, Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Brennan is spending Christmas with his adored wife, Julia, and daughter, Anna, in Julia's native Krakow. If the opening scene of domestic happiness, tree-trimming in a cozy apartment, feels too perfect to last, it is. A car accident kills Anna and Julia. Trapped in the passenger seat, Richard is sure he will never forget the face of the other driver, who glances into their car before fleeing the scene. That driver, never identified by the police, is Bogdan Baranowski, who's rushing to the hospital. A German shepherd has mauled his friend Marek as they made a botched robbery attempt, an act of desperation by men facing ruin in post-communist Poland. Over the novel's 10-year span, Bogdan and Richard struggle separately to come to terms with what happened that night. Richard allows himself to become stunted by his grief. After helping another reporter cover the murder/suicide of a couple and their three children--a tragedy that, like the car crash, combines an accident of bad timing with bad decision-making--Richard realizes he's lost his ambition as a serious journalist. Meanwhile, Bogdan drinks to excess and loses his job. His wife leaves him. He takes the rap for a minor crime and spends a year in prison to expiate his guilt over the Brennan deaths. But Bogdan's potential goodness will have readers rooting for him. Actually, readers will root for all the novel's tenderly drawn, flawed characters.Despite his book's depiction of dark realities--the guilt and despair of the characters' interior lives is matched by political turmoil in both the U.S. and Eastern Europe--Yarbrough's pensively hopeful view of people' capacity to endure, even prosper, shines through.

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December 1, 2017
Richard sits dazed in the passenger seat of his family's wrecked Mercedes on a dark, icy road outside Krakow, shards of glass embedded in his face. He stares out into the cold night and into a pair of eyes belonging to Bogdan, a once-successful grocer now driven to criminal enterprise and the cause of the accident that just killed Richard's wife and daughter. In Yarbrough's (The Realm of Last Chances, 2013) emotionally resonant character study, Richard resumes an existence as a Los Angeles Times reporter, but with his life and its meaning essentially drained out of him and into that frozen Polish soil. He finally finds new purpose while covering, alongside an alluring female reporter, a murder involving a popular college football coach. In alternating chapters, guilt-ridden Bogdan serves time for another petty crime with little hope until he discovers something approximating love. Yarbrough's stylistically assured tale provides a profound meditation on grief, guilt, resilience, and hope as well as authentic insights into the inner lives of his characters as they attempt to excavate meaning from the ruins.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)