Before

Over one September night on their small suburban street, the neighbors of Joseph Hurka's novel Before connect. Whether they're strangers, acquaintances, or ultimately closest allies, the familiar residents of a street in Hurka's Cambridge, Massachusetts, fascinate and terrify, and Hurka's debut novel offers us the depths of their strange and secret lives. Seventy-three-year-old Jiri Posselt and his wife, Anna, are survivors of the Nazi horror in Czechoslovakia; they have befriended a neighbor named Tika LaFond, a college student who has faced great challenges of her own. And as night descends we meet another character, a man who enters the apartments of neighborhood women when they aren't home, taking a peculiar inventory of their lives. We discover why this ghostly man, haunted terribly by his past, is so twisted. When he becomes increasingly violent and, in the early hours of morning, fixes his attention exclusively on Tika, it will fall to Jiri...