The Astral is a huge rose-colored old pile of an apart­ment building in the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For decades it was the home of the poet Harry Quirk, his wife, Luz, and their two children. But Luz has found (and destroyed) some poems of Harry’s that ignite her long-simmering sus­picions of infidelity, and he’s been kicked out. Now he must reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, financial and parental failures. Reviewed by Norah Piehl.

Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell is missing. And the neighborhood boys she's left behind are caught forever in the heady current of her absence. As the days and years pile up, the mystery of her disappearance grows, and the boys still long for her.

In the roiling, electrified streets of New York City in the 1980s, Eliza, Jude and Johnny each show up wanting a place to hide --- from everything that has gone wrong, big and small, in their short lives. These three, thrown together by their parents’ mistakes and their own, and by the accidental death of a teenage boy, find their regrets transformed into a single, covert mission.