Vengeance

Despite the words "A Novel" on the cover, I found myself struggling to think of Vengeance as anything but true. In part, that's by design: the main character is a journalist named Zachary Lazar who meets an inmate at the notorious plantation-style Angola Prison in Louisiana and decides to look into his claims of innocence. But it's also a tribute to the humble, detailed brilliance of the novelist's work in portraying both his character and the lives of those he investigates. His true-or-not-true style becomes a way of reckoning with the difficult, ambivalent work of paying witness in a society organized around punishment and race. True or not, it's a quietly stunning work of fiction.