ON THE ISLE OF ANTIOCH

Lebanese-born French author Maalouf delivers an elegant portrait of a dying world.

Alec Zander, a pseudonymous genius who’s given up law and economics for cartooning, lives in self-imposed exile on a tiny island off the coast of France “called, curiously enough, Antioch.” He’s lived there alone for years, courtesy of a chance purchase his father made at the end of World War II, but now he has a neighbor, an archly mysterious woman named, meaningfully, Ève. As Maalouf’s novel opens, another mystery is at play: The electricity is out, the satellites are dead, the radio is silent. When it finally comes crackling back a few days later, it brings dire news of nuclear war—one that hasn’t gone to the worst-case scenario thanks to the intervention of a kind of parallel human species who have powers beyond those of ordinary mortals. All—like Agamemnon, a fellow Alec knows from a bar on a neighboring island—have Greek names. Talking to an old friend well placed in the U.S. government, Alec learns of one such emissary to Washington: “He says he’s called Demosthenes….He certainly doesn’t look much like any Greeks I know. He has copper-colored skin and speaks English like he’s spent his entire life in Massachusetts.” Hmmm. These other-humans seem to mean well, but for their troubles, “the uninvited,” ruled by a demigoddess and for all purposes immortal, come under attack by the very people they’re trying to save, and the world spirals into further madness. Maalouf’s near-future yarn is reminiscent of Arturo Pérez-Reverte in its matter-of-fact presentation of the improbable, but the overarching warning is quite of our world and time: As the ever-pensive Ève remarks, “Future historians will say our civilization was so worm-eaten that it took only a flick of the wrist for the whole edifice to collapse.”

A beguiling, lyrical work of speculative fiction by a writer of international importance.