Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite

In Robert Lovinger’s The Flickering of Souls, Tiago Madeira tends the bar at the Truro Café in Cape Cod while rebuilding his life after cocaine use cost him his marriage and landed him in jail in Boston. When he begins volunteering at Gardner Hospice in nearby Wellfleet, he meets Celia Lindsey, a dying woman who once gave up a baby girl for adoption. Celia has found her daughter, Dana Morgan, a sleep scientist in Santa Fe, but has hidden from Dana’s attempts to learn her birth mother’s name. After Celia asks Tiago to investigate Dana before deciding whether to speak with her, Tiago rejects the plan and acts on his own. His choice sends him across the country with information that Dana has spent years seeking, putting three lives on a course none of them expected.

Robert Lovinger’s The Flickering of Souls is the work of an author alert to the moral weight of small gestures. A Cape Cod bartender in recovery settling a drunk patron into a booth, a hospice patient speaking of a child once surrendered, an adopted Santa Fe professor pausing over another woman’s terror before making her own choice: these moments matter in the author’s hands because of the humane pressure he brings to them. Most impressive are the ancillary characters, who are treated with the same fleshing out as the main cast. Abina Opoku in her plant-filled kitchen gives the story one of its finest women, and is proof that kindness in any room changes the air. The Truro Café and Canyon Road have the same lived-in feel, and readers who enjoy true literary fiction will adore this book. Recommended.