In the years before World War II, 30,000 Jewish immigrants fleeing Nazi Germany landed in — of all places — Shanghai. One of these was author, playwright, and doctor Max Mohr, who left behind his non-Jewish wife, Kathe, and his daughter. Mohr promised to send for them once his embryonic medical practice was established. But he never did.

Frederick Reuss' novel Mohr starts where the historical records on the man leave off. In a series of connected vignettes, beginning with Mohr's tearful departure for Shanghai and then following the separate lives of the doctor and his wife, Reuss tries to understand why the doctor let his separation from his spouse become permanent. In Shanghai, Mohr pursues a nurse who works at a nearby hospital, but the budding romance is complicated when the Japanese invade and a policeman begins to suspect that Mohr is somehow collaborating with them. Back in Germany, as the realities of anti-Semitism and her personal abandonment become too much to ignore, Kathe begins to contemplate a move to Shanghai of her own.

The two lead characters plod forward uncertainly: Mohr tries to live his life in Shanghai as the adventure he always wanted to have, but he's held back by memories of home and China's alien culture; Kathe assuages her loneliness by telling her daughter stories about her husband, but she's quietly overcome by pain. Reuss elegantly probes how separation turns to loneliness, and the ways in which people try to start their lives over, all the while animating a strangely quiet Germany and a chaotic Shanghai.

In a move that won him favorable a comparison to W.G. Sebald, Reuss has placed within the text 47 photographs either of or by Mohr, which he discovered while researching the novel. Mute testaments to the reality that the author is trying to imagine, the photos continually provide a counterpoint to the story. In one, we see Mohr in a starched white shirt and big glasses, gazing uncertainly into the camera. He looks so unlike a man who would abandon his wife half a world away, but so like a man who's frustrated in his search for a new life in a strange land.

-Scott Esposito