11 May / Face: A Novel of the Anthropocene by Jaspreet Singh [in Shelf Awareness]
Jaspreet Singh’s third novel, Face, presents a mesmerizing narrative. “In this new epoch most stories rhyme with crime,” Singh opens. (Indeed, two murders on two continents will happen by novel’s end.) This clever beginning introduces strangers Lucia and Lila (“correct pronunciation: Leela”), who meet in a Calgary fiction workshop. Their fates are already decided by chapter two: “neither one of them was aware that within the next fifty-one days one of them was going to die.”
Lila is an award-winning journalist for a science magazine and wants to learn to write creatively. The workshop instructor randomly partners Lila with Lucia; the pair become fast friends. Lucia’s husband, Amitabh, is an Indian immigrant like Lila, familiar from a distance: “I had a feeling that I knew that face,” Lila notes to herself at first glance. She meets Amitabh again at a geology conference, discovering him where he shouldn’t be. Their interactions raise more questions, further provoking Lila to seek answers. Meanwhile, both Lucia and Lila continue to construct their assigned fictions, which veer too closely to suppressed truths.
Singh (Helium), born in India and based in Calgary, is also a scientist with a doctorate in chemical engineering. Face is riotous with erudition – a heady mix of global climate warnings, earth sciences, fossil discoveries and hoaxes, and speculative fiction (Liu Cixin and Octavia Butler get nods), all amalgamated into gorgeous prose. Lucky readers who choose this can expect temporal shifts, compounding mysteries, and irresistibly unreliable – and even otherworldly – narration.
Review: “Fiction,” Shelf Awareness, May 3, 2022
Readers: Adult
Published: 2022