Banks’s novel about a small upstate-New York town devastated by a school bus accident that kills a decent percentage of the town’s children is told in four voices. We start with Dolores, who was driving the bus, then move to the father of two of the dead children, one of the lawyers who inundate the town seeking participants in a class-action suit, and one of the survivors, a fourteen-year-old beauty queen whose injuries from the accident have made her dependent on a wheelchair for mobility. Every section is told in first person, and Banks takes advantage of the intimacy of that mode of narration to slyly seed uncertainty about everyone’s understanding and motives. This is particularly effective in the sections with Dolores and Nichole, the survivor, who (we quickly realise) has been molested by her father for years; both of them are incredibly sympathetic and nuanced voices. Mitchell, the lawyer, gets slightly too melodramatic an arc, his terrible relationship with a drug-addled daughter forming a clear (and excessive) parallel to the child loss that his clients-to-be have experienced. I enjoyed this but suspect it isn’t Banks’s best; I’d like to try his chunkster Cloudsplitter, about the abolitionist John Brown. Source: bought secondhand from Daedalus Books in Charlottesville