A GREAT VOID rises in Yann Martel's new novel, and for the three men who act as the loose tethers of its three interwoven stories, the means of filling that void lies deep in the northern stretches of the Iberian countryside, among the scrubland and the stones. Spreading its action over the course of the 20th century, "The High Mountains of Portugal" probes the tender center of grief: Each of its three sections follows the fallout that results from the death of a man's wife. The first, Tomás, sets out from Lisbon in 1904, procuring one of the first automobiles in the country as he tries to find a lost relic: "Resolve surges in him. There is a church in the High Mountains of Portugal waiting for him. He must get to it. This metal box on wheels will help him- Isso e minha casa. This is home." The car takes on mythical, almost magical trappings - it delivers unwieldy power and fear, which have their own dire consequences. Tomás's narrative burns with energy and mystery, but the two that follow, featuring men named Eusebio and Peter, drag to a slow swirl, entwined in a dense, allegorical dialogue that ranges from the nature of theodicy to the work of Agatha Christie to the behavior of the great apes. The cultural and physical landscape of Portugal looms over every page. This is a country "solemn in its beauty," with its "great outcrops of round rocks. Dark green vegetation that is dry and scrubby. Wandering flocks of goats and sheep." But it is the mountains that inspire the novel's central characters, men constantly seeking what they may never find. Crucial to the mood of the narrative is the Portuguese concept of saudade, an untranslatable word that conveys a desire for a past moment that may be forever unattainable. Saudade bleeds into the Portuguese language, which sounds, as Martel puts it, like "a slurred mournful whisper." It can also manifest itself in the country's people; one man notes that everyone he encounters "smells of time and radiates solitude." At key moments, saudade is even manifest in the actions of the characters: Tomás chooses to walk backward, unable to tear his eyes from where he has been, objecting to the loss of what he once had. Martel's narrative of men driven to adventurous lives by love and death strikes at something ancient and instinctual. After all, grief, mortality and mountains also figure in one of humanity's oldest tales, "The Epic of Gilgamesh," in which the title character undertakes his quest after the death of his beloved friend. There are other ancient influences at work here too, notably the biblical story of Job. These structural overtones add richness to Martel's novel, and so does his voluminous research, deployed (as in his best-known work, "Life of Pi") among a wide range of subjects. But although his writing hums with a vivid populism, his emotional and allegorical tale seems at times almost too safely well done to do justice to the ragged and tortured people whose tragedies it traces. At one point, a woman invokes Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" According to Martel, the invocation reminds us that someone must in fact be listening - and that listening means the prostrated cannot be forsaken. "Grief is a disease," one of Martel's characters insists. For Tomás, Eusebio and Peter, the cure, it seems, is in the journey itself. MIKE BROIDA has written for The Washington Post, The Rumpus, The Iowa Review and other publications.

Divided into three sections-Homeless, Homeward, and Home-that converge in the titular mountains, three men epitomize the concepts after which the sections are named. Part 1's Tomás, grieving the loss of his lover and son, takes his uncle's auto-mobile-one of 1904's first-in search of a religious artifact mentioned in an ancient diary of one Father Ulisses, setting in motion an epic odyssey. In Part 2, set in 1938-39, Eusebio, a pathologist, discusses the many parallels between Agatha Christie's murder mysteries and the mystical life of Jesus Christ and is then confronted with an autopsy whose results he cannot explain. Part 3 jumps to 1981 when Peter, a Canadian senator, reacts to his wife's death by acquiring a chimpanzee and abandoning everything familiar to return to a birthplace he doesn't remember. Mark Bramhall's versatile narration flows easily from a twentysomething character's desperation to a sixtysomething's acceptance, with even stronger cross-gender characterizations as he reads such characters as a playfully intelligent wife, a long-suffering widow, and a concerned sister thousands of miles away. VERDICT Recommended for fans of the author and interconnected narratives. ["An engrossing reading experience, with disparate elements combined into a coherent whole": LJ 2/1/16 starred review of the Spiegal & Grau hc.]-Terry Hong, -Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Not even the gods can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold and lays him out at last. These memorable lines from the Odyssey ring entirely true over the course of the three disparate sections that bind loosely together to form Martel's (Beatrice and Virgil, 2011) latest novel, which emphasizes the cruel hand of destiny in shaping our unpredictable lives. Tomás, Maria Dores Passos Castros, and Peter Tovy might be separated by time and circumstance, but they are connected by their shared family history, which can be traced to the high mountains of Portugal. Each also suffers a devastating loss that scars his or her psyche seemingly irreparably. Martel's familiar trope of our interconnectedness with the animal world (realized indelibly in The Life of Pi, 2002) a chimpanzee is a recurring element through the three narratives seems a bit discombobulated here, and the plot's many improbable coincidences strain credulity. Nevertheless, this allegorical tale drives home the ephemeral nature of beauty and joy and the thin line we all walk between normalcy and madness, especially in the wake of loss. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Martel is a magnet for fiction lovers, who will be curious about his new novel.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2015 Booklist