Amazon.com (ISBN 0684854589, Hardcover)

In Swiss writer Zoë Jenny's haunting debut novel, The Pollen Room, an absent mother poisons her daughter's world, down to its very air. Always on her way out the door, trailing scarves, hair, and discarded blossoms in her wake, Lucy is so distracted, unmaternal, and alluring that it's hard to say whether she makes things worse for the narrator--her daughter, Jo--when she's around or when she's gone. Jo never gives up hope for Lucy, meaning she gets endlessly pummeled. When Lucy takes off permanently with her lover Alois, abandoning her 5-year-old daughter to the reckless care of her father, Jo must spend nights entirely alone in the house while her father drives a delivery truck. For the adolescent girl, reunited with Lucy in Alois's house after his suspicious death, it is another deeper, fresher hell to watch her mother--at the first sign of recovered energy--begin to plan her escape into the arms of another new man. Jo, to the contrary, can't flee anywhere. She barely gets out of bed. Her landscape, though, is in constant motion--particularly when she's outdoors, or with Lucy.

"It would be pretty creepy up here alone at night, don't you think?" I asked her. She looked over at me as if I'd said something completely irrelevant, and suddenly the ground seemed to buck under my feet as if I were riding on the back of an unbroken beast. The sky threatened to open wide, and I felt the hardness of the earth beneath me. I tried to concentrate on the mole under the left corner of Lucy's mouth, but her face broke up into pieces as she leaned over me, peering into my eyes.

Translated from the German by Paris Review editor Elizabeth Gaffney, The Pollen Room charts Jo's suffocating life with an uncommon, unflinching eye. Time passes, and Jo's world simply does not rebuild itself. But readers will find their own worlds enlarged by the sustained lyricism and honesty in Zoë Jenny's writing. --Jean Lenihan