Rebecca Campbell, The Paradise Engine
Rebecca Campbell's debut novel, The Paradise Engine , is all about missed opportunities, misperceptions, misconceptions, and outright mistakes. This conveniently lines up with my own missed opportunity and/or mistake, because as it happens, this debut novel appeared in 2013 from NeWest Press (from their Nunatak First Fiction Series ). Once again, I'm unaccountably late to the party, and this was a party I really wish I'd attended all along. Overall I found it a deliberately mystifying and therefore delightfully satisfying novel, even if I'm disappointed that I don't get to read all the other novels that its pages imply might also exist. The Paradise Engine is a deeply West Coast novel, jumping back and forth between two timelines: one organized around Liam Manley in the 1920s and 1930s, a tenor who'd been wounded in the Great War and ekes out the rest of his life singing with increasingly small-time vaudeville-like troupes, and the other organized around Anthe
