In the Acknowledgments section of this deeply felt and thoughtfully crafted book, the author, Beth Kephart, writes: “Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News begins with truth. It extends through fiction.” The truth consists of fragmented details of the life of her grandmother, Margaret Finley D’Imperio, who died on October 30, 1969, when Kephart was nine. “She was the great love of my life,” Kephart writes. “She was a mystery.” 

Kephart observes that decades after Margaret’s death, her brother arrived one Thanksgiving with “a box that included a handful of long-lost pages–family genealogy, notes from my mother’s cousin. … My Aunt Miriam’s few spare pages suggest the contours of my grandmother’s life”–for example, her favorite song and her employment at the Fleisher Yarn Company in Philadelphia. Yet at the time of the box’s arrival, so much about Margaret remained unknown, a deficiency that Kephart overcomes, to great effect, in the pages of Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News.

Kephart immerses us in the vividly imagined life of Margaret (known mostly as Peggy in the book) and in scenes from Philadelphia at the time of the First World War, when Peggy was a teenager and at a turning point in her life. In the process, Kephart makes us care deeply about Peggy’s loves, dreams, and fears, creating a work that stands as a profound gesture of love for both her grandmother and the city of Philadelphia.

In the acknowledgments section of this beautifully crafted, revelatory collection, Tara Lynn Masih mentions her realization, while putting the book together, that many of the stories are connected by the theme of disappearance. Indeed, the collection explores literal and metaphorical disappearances, and how these lead characters to transformative discoveries about themselves and, in some cases, about the spiritual world.

This searing, emotionally resonant story collection immerses us in the struggles of characters who, in many cases, are trying to make sense of the past, or of murky or troubled relationships–often, when they are at a crossroads in their lives. Haunting virtually all of the stories are traumas from the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Linforth considers how chasms may exist between family members, or between (current or former) lovers–and how it may be possible to never fully connect with, much less understand, those with whom we share blood, or with whom we’ve shared our lives. Yet sometimes, those chasms can be bridged, and he captures such moments with powerful prose.

Spanning three generations and the interconnected lives of multiple characters, The Door-Man is an inventive and revelatory novel. At the heart of it are two possibly unbridgeable gaps: between the central character’s fragmented understanding of his family’s history and the truth, and between an ancestral cycle of tragedy and a potentially hopeful future.

When it comes to seemingly impossible capabilities, two of the most wished-for ones must be time travel and the ability to meet notable figures from the past. In this engrossing novel, both of these wishes become a reality, delivering profound rewards and significant dangers, some of which could reverberate across time. The result is a gripping and thought-provoking read.

What might be gained, or lost, by diving into the wreckage of one’s past? And what might one learn about herself, and those closest to her, in the process? This perceptive and darkly funny novel takes up these questions in multiple ways, conveying the dangers and possibilities of such a venture.