In the Memory of the Forest

Even in the days after the collapse of Communism, the Poland of Charles Powers's novel is an "old country in an old Europe," a place that harbors the stories and secrets of a complex and tortured history. When a young farmer named Leszek starts looking into the unexplained murder of a childhood friend in his small hometown of Jadowia, he is led into a dark terrain, and begins to uncover difficult truths about war crimes committed by members of his own family. It's a complex, literary detective story, rendered in precise, jewel-like prose. Powers, who died in 1996, knows whereof he speaks: a journalist for the Los Angeles Times for more than twenty years, he served as the paper's Eastern European bureau chief from 1986-1991.