What Happened to Anna K.: A Novel (Touchstone Books)

Amazon Best of the Month, August 2008: With her fresh reinvention of Anna Karenina, Irina Reyn finds her tragic heroine in the Russian-Jewish immigrants of New York's outer boroughs. As in the Tolstoy, an impetuous woman wasting in a sterile marriage succumbs to a destined-for-disaster love affair with a dashing young man, and is bitterly condemned by a society fraught with hypocrisy; like citizens of19th-century Russia, modern-day Bukharians don't take kindly to wifely infidelity. With an ear for witty dialogue and a knack for imagery both sharp and sensuous, Reyn gives a pixel-perfect depiction of Anna's world. Those caught in her undertow are equally multidimensional, most with their own struggles between loyalty to self and longing for community acceptance. Even those who haven't experienced Tolstoy will be rapt. --Mari Malcolm