Mecca: A Novel

"I think of Susan Straight as the anti-Joan Didion. Both write about California, but Straight always felt her experience of California – filled with working-class refugees from Texas, Mississippi and Oaxaca – was overlooked, even dismissed, by Didion and her literary peers. Straight’s newest novel, Mecca, is a fine set of interwoven tales from her California. It’s set in a Southern California filled with desert highways, strip malls and small suburban houses where everyday people are sometimes faced with choices that are anything but. Her writing is both luminous and sharp and told, as usual, through richly layered family histories."