The Celestials

In The Celestials, Karen Shepard's fourth novel, a story of unrequited love emerges from a striking and dramatic set piece—the arrival, in June of 1870, of seventy-five Chinese laborers in a small Massachusetts town. Brought in as strikebreakers, their story seems set to provide the dramatic impetus of the novel; instead, however, Shepard deftly and wisely pivots from the essentially quiet and undramatic lives of the diaspora to the internal emotional landscape of a set of characters who all feel themselves outsiders to some degree, and whose lives are irrevocably shifted by the arrival of the train from San Francisco on that summer's morning in 1870.