If I hadn’t read the jacket copy, I would have assumed A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is the work of an accomplished, many-times-published novelist. 

But it’s Anthony Marra’s first novel, and when you read it, you’re going to weep, not just because there’s no way that should be possible, but because the story is so moving and so perfectly told, a gut-wrenching exploration of two Chechen wars, history, family, and the significance of place.

Eight-year-old Havaa’s father, Dokka, is disappeared by Russian forces in the middle of the night. Their neighbor Akhmed (like Dokka and Havaa, an ethnic Chechen) finds Havaa in the woods the next morning, and (rightly) fearing for her safety, takes her to the last doctor in the only hospital in the neighboring city, an ethnic Russian named Sonja. Sonja is processing her own trauma — the disappearance of her sister, Natasha. Over the course of the novel, the threads connecting all the principal characters — Dokka, Havaa, Akhmed, Sonja, Natasha, and Dokka’s betrayer and the betrayer’s father — slowly reveal themselves, forming a web more complicated and more harrowing than any of the characters understand.

The narrative jumps back and forward over a period of ten years, but the tendrils of connection reach back into Soviet Russia and forward into a future that’s not yet known. Tangential sequences that reveal information about secondary characters were masterful; the level of detail, the attentiveness to the minutiae of human survival, are impeccable.

I could write about this book for pages and pages, but I don’t want to ruin anyone else’s sense of discovery. It’s a December book, in that it will make you feel grateful for whatever and whomever you have to wrap around you.

*Be forewarned: there are torture scenes that made me physically ill, and I have a strong stomach.