by Reif Larsen
First published 2016
Radar Radmanovic arrives in the world on an April day in 1975, his dark skin baffling doctors and devastating his white New Jersey parents. Desperate for answers, his family travels to the Norwegian Arctic, where a mysterious community of puppeteers experiments with electroshock treatments. The procedure lightens Radar's skin but leaves him epileptic and hypersensitive to electricity. As Radar grows up, strange art performances emerge across war zones from Bosnia to Cambodia to the Congo. Artists and scientists stage surreal puppet shows featuring lifelike figures and birds, creating alternate worlds amid the violence. These performances connect to resistance teachers in arctic Norway, brothers on opposite sides of Yugoslavia's civil war, and a French landowner's scientific experiment with an adopted Cambodian child. Radar discovers he stands at the center of this bewildering movement, his unusual condition somehow linking these global events. The story weaves through the twentieth century's worst conflicts, following characters who search for meaning in art and human connection when everything else collapses around them.
Genres: drama, art, literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, global-connections
Setting: New Jersey, Norwegian Arctic, Bosnia, Cambodia, Congo
Period: 1975, 20th Century
768 pages · Hardcover · Fischer
Content warnings: medical-trauma