Enter Liam O'Donnell. In stories both humorous and harrowing, McLaughlin often focuses on this boy from the north of Ireland, living in Scotland. The zigzag structure of the book means every second story returns to Liam as he navigates growing up, away from his home town and wider family. A unique take on Ireland and Scotland, the Troubles, and religion is the result. In "big trouble," the O'Donnell "weans" stage a memorable cross between an Orange walk and a civil rights march. Bloody Sunday is later experienced as a series of phone calls. Punctuating the Liam stories are other haunting...

In the wildly entertaining novel"The Blue Soda Siphon," the narrator unexpectedly finds himself back in the world of his childhood: Switzerland in the 1940s. He returns to his childhood home to find his parents frantic because their son is missing. Then, in another switch, the young boy that he was back then turns up in the present of the early 1990s, during the Gulf War, where he meets himself as an older man, and meets his adult self s young daughter. These head-scratching, hilarious time shifts happen when both the adult narrator and his childhood self go to the cinema and see films, the...

The day is Friday, May 22, 2032. On this day, the day after his ninety-fourth birthday, a man is sitting in a beautiful garden. It is a paradise where he often played during his childhood, and it is here that he is recording the story of his adventures with Mr. Adamson. In the course of this compelling novel from Swiss author Urs Widmer, this man narrates his unusual story to his granddaughter, Anni. While he recounts his life, he is also waitingwaiting for the arrival of this very Mr. Adamson, whom he has not seen since the age of eight. Even then it was a mysterious encountera glimpse into...