Limbo — Melania G. Mazzucco

It's Christmas Eve and twenty-seven-year-old Manuela Paris is returning home to a seaside town outside Rome. Years ago, she left to become a soldier--a platoon commander in the Afghan desert--fleeing an unhappy, rebellious adolescence. Now she's fleeing something else entirely: the memory of a bloody attack that left her seriously injured.

Numb and adrift, she is startled to life by an encounter with a mysterious stranger, a man without a past who is, like her, suspended in his own private limbo of expectation and hope. Their relationship, at once confusing and invigorating, forces her to confront her past and the secrets she is hiding.

In chapters that toggle between Manuela at home and in Afghanistan, Melania G. Mazzucco limns a story of love and loss, death and resistance. "Limbo" asks its readers, no less than its protagonist, what it means to be a daughter, a sister, a woman, a citizen, a soldier, a veteran-or, more simply, a human.