All the Names They Used for God

December 4, 2017
The nine stories in Sachdeva’s intriguing debut collection raise challenging questions about human responses to short-circuited desires. Equally at home in realistic and speculative plots, Sachdeva crafts precise character studies with minimal flourishes. “Anything You Might Want” follows the quick crumbling of the relationship between the daughter of a rich, controlling Montana magnate and an indebted miner, and her tantalizing opportunity for revenge. “Robert Greenman and the Mermaid” also focuses on an unwise emotional attachment, bringing together a laconic fisherman and an actual mermaid who nets his ship the largest catches in years. Some stories are creative riffs on historic events, including the title story, in which two kidnapping victims of Boko Haram discover a quasimagical form of hypnosis that can control men. Others, such as “Manus,” point to alarming futures, in which aliens have conquered earth without upsetting life too much—other than requiring all humans replace their hands with metal prosthetics. The most affecting story, “Pleiades,” updates the hubris of Greek tragedy: the inexplicable illnesses of genetically modified septuplets undercut their parents’ faith in science. Throughout, characters face a perpetual constraint against full expression of their emotions. These inventive stories will challenge readers to rethink how people cope with thwarted hopes.

Starred review from December 15, 2017
So rich they read like dreams--or, more often, nightmares--the nine stories in Sachdeva's otherworldly debut center upon the unforgiving forces that determine the shape of our lives, as glorious as they are brutal."Wonder and terror meet at the horizon, and we walk the knife-edge between them," Sachdeva writes in her brief introduction; this is the world of her stories. There are no merciless gods here, not like in the olden days; instead, there is "science, nature, psychology, industry." But these modern forces are as vast and incomprehensible as any gods were. The stories that follow span time, space, and logic: Nigeria and New Hampshire, the past and the future, realism and science fiction. And yet, for all its scope, it is a strikingly unified collection, with each story reading like a poem, or a fable, staring into the unknowable. In "The World by Night," a lonely young woman in the Ozarks is abandoned--temporarily, and then forever--by her husband and finds dangerous refuge in a secret cave. "Logging Lake" follows a man in the midst of a post-breakup reinvention on the haunting date that will change the course of his life (whatever you're thinking, that's not it). "All the Names for God" follows two Nigerian women now forging "normal" adult lives after having been kidnapped as teens by extremists, their unimaginable history intertwined with the struggles of acclimating to the world they used to know. Equal parts cinematic and nauseating, the dystopian "Manus" is set in a world invaded by alien "Masters," who demand, as part of their dominion, that human citizens undergo "re-handing"--a painless procedure that replaces hands with metal forks, required for everyone, sooner or later. They are enormous stories, not in length but in ambition, each an entirely new, unsparing world.Beautiful, draining--and entirely unforgettable.

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March 1, 2018

In the best stories in this smooth collection, individuals longing for something better face adversity and keep moving. An albino girl in the American West loses her parents, marries a charming drifter who loves her but decides to continue his travels, then teeters at the edge of a chasm, with people below calling, and falls "into their waiting arms." An ambitious young man leaves Denmark to "find a place where he could live with abandon," is horribly injured in a factory blast and sullenly accepts dependence on his young daughter, yet travels with her and her mentor to excavate ruins in Egypt. Two young African women kidnapped as teenagers by Muslim extremists return home, having learned to get what they want. Indeed, adversity can teach you things; a man determined to be new at the dating game has a disastrous camping experience (the nutty woman whose invitation he accepted has disappeared) and decides he was happier with his old self. VERDICT Not all these stories startle, but Sachdeva is a writer to watch.

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