K Chess's magnificent speculative novel Famous Men Who Never Lived straddles two among infinite worlds, "starting off the same and hurtling to two wholly different fates." It is an awesome and humbling literary achievement.

In the world that Hel, Vikram, and over two hundred thousand other universally displaced people left behind, nuclear explosions were impetus enough to step through a portal into the unknown. They found themselves in a world not terribly different from their own: active, troubled, and hostile to outsiders, though also alive with art and possibilities.

In the two years that followed, some of the UDPs, like Vikram, adjusted, if as second-class citizens of reduced fortunes. As Vikram toils as a night guard, Hel—a specialized surgeon in her own world—lives off of government assistance and devours Vikram's relics in search of peace, particularly novels by authors who were never authors in this strange new place. One such author, Ezra Sleight, may be the key to determining where the two timelines diverged, and it's a possibility that consumes Hel's hours.

Chess's pages are elegiac as much as they are inventive and hopeful. Our world, seen through UDP eyes, is a place of yawing holes—musical notes that never trilled; stories never told; beloved and important people whom fate carried into obscurity or oblivion. Her characters peek beneath the ripples in the multiverse, probing permeable dimensions for deeper truths.

The text is triumphant, darkly humorous, and mournful by turns. All of Hel's hungry actions conceal the unmourned loss of her son. Elsewhere, a resentful UDP takes to inventing customs to silence the always-here: where she's from, she tells people, they carry cats everywhere, and drink blood, and slap corpses to be sure.

People prove to be both credulous and awkward in the face of the unknowable. As its characters grasp for a concrete place to rest in a world that ever diverges from its set paths, Famous Men Who Never Lived is mesmerizing.

DEBUT Hel and Vikram are just two of 156,000 refugees living in New York who arrived not from another country, but an alternate earth. Hel, unwilling to grow attached to anything in her new world, becomes obsessed with the divergence of her earth and ours and hopes to found a museum dedicated to her fellow UDPs (Universally Displaced Persons). The centerpiece of her fixation is a book Vikram brought with him called The Pyronauts, by an author with a cult following in Hel's world but who died as a child in ours. When the work, a symbol of everything lost to Hel, is presumed stolen, our prickly protagonist, tortured by what she left behind, is determined to get it back. VERDICT The plight of refugees gets a sf twist in this enjoyable debut from award-winning short story writer Chess. While the side plots could have been tightened, those looking for character-driven, science-light sf should give this a try.—Megan M. McArdle, Lib. of Congress, National Lib. Svc. for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

Musing on xenophobia, forced migration, and fear of the other, this debut from Chess too often goes off track. Hel and Vikram escaped from a parallel-universe version of Queens, N.Y., to the one we know, fleeing the explosions of sabotaged nuclear power plants. Only 156,000 universally displaced persons (UDPs) escaped before the gate letting them through closed forever. The refugees were only able to bring a few things with them, and they cherish these irreplaceable items, such as Vikram's copy of The Pyronauts, a classic work from their world. When the book is stolen, Hel risks being arrested to get it back, as she worries that a crucial part of the history of her people—including the son she left behind—will be forgotten. Several different subplots and unnecessary excerpts from The Pyronauts are scattered throughout. Chess has constructed a good premise, and part of the story has a satisfactory conclusion; however, the narrative frequently loses momentum. This confused debut will leave readers with more questions than answers. Agent: Stacia Decker, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Mar.)