Fiction. Tess keeps vigil at the bedside of her friend Laura through a long night of labor as Laura's first child arrives. The two have known each other for what seems like forever. Their humanitarian aid work has taken them from the Balkans, to Egypt, to Istanbul amid the ongoing refugee crisis--an era that includes the US's war in Iraq, the Arab Spring, and many forms of global consequence and aftermath. Brad Fox's first novel is a luminous inquiry...