Called Out — A.G. Mojtabai

"Long on vision, and as lyrical as need be," in the words of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, A. G. Mojtabai's novels are well-known for their consummate craft. Nowhere is this vision more evident than in her splendid new novel, Called Out, which renders compellingly the larger connections linking even the most isolated lives.
The story is set in the small rural Texas town of Bounds, where, one windswept afternoon, a passenger jet crashes and the great world drops in. As survivors stumble through the fields and relatives of the deceased converge upon the town, five narrators recall their experiences of the disaster and its aftermath: Father Mark, the priest summoned to minister to the accident victims; Glenna Wooten, the town postmaster, whose field has been devastated by the crash; a newspaper reporter, obsessively poking through the rubble of facts for the meaning that eludes him; Chip Parker, a solitary young man haunted by the single treasure he snatches from the wreckage - an emblem of his own brokenness; and Francie Alred, a woman who, after years in the city, has returned home to pick up the pieces of her life.
Called Out is a novel intricately voiced, rich with character and sense of place. In exploring the impact of disaster on a little town and on those people, near and far, "called out" by the crash, it reminds us of the small personal worlds we all inhabit, their limits challenged, pushed toward growth, by collision with what lies beyond.