From Ms. Magazine:
A Handbook to Luck by Cristina Garcia
We call the world small as we navigate our technology-rich, travel-dense lives. A ping in the email inbox signals an old friend who has found you on the Internet; a stranger in the airplane seat next to you lived next door to your sister at college. Our lives don’t just touch each other’s, the sensation of a brushed shoulder in a train station staying with us later. Our lives influence each other’s, pressing us toward situations that some might see as good luck or bad luck, but what Leila in García’s novel would insist is simply the fate written indelibly on our foreheads at birth.
Styled in juxtaposed narratives of three children initially living thousands of miles apart, A Handbook to Luck follows them through 20 years as they mine the circumstances presented to them, attempt to cross the emotional and physical borders before them, and ultimately choose paths that bring them to intersect and detach in heartrending and soaring ways.
More here.