Improvement

As with her previous book, Fools, Silber's new novel is a collection of interconnected stories, in which the connections are not always initially apparent. The work opens from the perspective of Reyna, a young single mother in New York City whose African American boyfriend is doing time at Rikers. The narrative then passes to her Aunt Kiki, now a seemingly staid older woman living alone in the East Village, and recounts her youthful adventurous in Turkey, where she abandoned her middle-class Jewish existence to marry a Turkish rug salesman in Istanbul and later moved to his family's remote farm in rural Cappadocia. Later chapters move to members of Reyna's circle, those affected when her newly released boyfriend's Virginia-to-New York cigarette smuggling scheme goes awry, the German antiquities smugglers that Aunt Kiki meets in Turkey in the 1970s, and the adult daughter of two of the Germans in the present day.