Reader recommendations: 'Katherine Carlyle'

Some books are so evocative, so imagistic, that they haunt your thoughts. A friend gave me a copy of Rupert Thomson's "Katherine Carlyle" before Thomson's appearance at the Twin Cities Book Festival in October. I was hesitant — another man writing about a young woman adrift? But Thomson sensitively portrays Katherine, who is grieving her mother's cancer death, her IVF origins, her absent father. She follows random signs from balmy Italy to freezing Russia, tempting fate with each move. Like Haruki Murakami's "1Q84," this book's lyric prose and vivid characters will engulf your dreams with mystery, beauty and pain.