The Isle of Youth: Stories

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2013: In her second short story collection, The Isle of Youth, Laura van den Berg plays frequently with readers' expectations. She surprises and delights with her gift for language and tone. If there's a cohesive bond between these seven stories, it's the women who inhabit them, all of whom are in search of something: luck, love, loved ones. Like all great short story collections, Isle is as much about interior landscapes as they are exterior ones. The centerpiece of the book is "Antarctica," about a woman who travels to the Antarctic Peninsula to recover the bones of her dead brother. It's in the frigid topography of the southernmost tip of the world that we discover a haunted secret, one that reveals a heartbreaking meditation on the weight of grief. --Kevin Nguyen