The best books with characters who seem to have nothing to do with each other

Dickens always has a fabulous range of characters—in this book the orphan Pip, who thinks he’s going to someday apprentice with his dear uncle the blacksmith, meets up with an escaped convict and then with a jilted heiress, and their roles in his fate are beautifully confused throughout. This is my favorite Dickens—it’s the most well-shaped—and it has held up for me. I had just re-read it in 2016, when I went to teach English in Laos for a month, and was thrilled to discover that one of my students, a novice Buddhist monk, was reading it, and Pip’s disasters on the borders of class made perfect sense to him.

This novel takes place in Kamchatka, in Far East Russia, and begins with the abduction of two young sisters. Each chapter then carries us into the life of a whole other character, and we get engrossed in her fate, as events move through the course of a year. The shadow of the missing girls arises every so often, and then we forget them, until they appear with brilliant drama toward the end of the book. The novel becomes a whodunit—and I suppose all mysteries are tasked with connecting improbables—that links its sequences in deep and moving ways.

The novel is set in three end-of-century time-frames—1893, 1993, and 2093. In the opening, set in a mansion on Washington Square in New York, we discover we’re in an America where same-sex marriage has been legal for a long time, and a young man is about to run off with a suitor his father distrusts (a new version of a Henry James plot). The next section is in Hawaii, the colonized Paradise, where descendant characters (with the same set of names, juggled) stumble and grab what they can of freedom and love. My favorite section is the last, where characters with those recurring names are in a New York of “cooling suits” and “decontamination chambers” and totalitarian rule. This is a wild and really quite brilliant book, whose sprawling parts are fueled by a searing vision.  

In a novel inspired by the decade-long kidnapping of three women in Cleveland, Ferrell has crafted a story out of voices. We hear each of the young women—their inner obsessions and distractions, the details they live inside of—before, during, and after their confinement, and their joy in each other. But Ferrell has also included the Miss Metropolitan of her title, a nosy woman living on the same street, with her eager attentions misdirected, one of the neighbors who didn’t notice. There’s an extra ambition in the reach of that, a context that insists on including unexpected corners, picking up lots of loosely connected characters to get the full meaning of the story.

Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the story begins with young Hakan Soderstrom leaving Sweden with his brother Linus for a less blighted life in America. After they’re separated, Hakan tries to walk from San Francisco to New York to find his brother. Instead he meets up with a deluded Irish gold prospector, a toothless dance hall queen who dresses him in velvet, dangerous Civil War soldiers, a visionary naturalist, and a host of other fantastic characters, as he wanders for years. No line links these characters except the wild needs of this radically revised picture of the West, and I was surprised on every page.