Eating well in Massachusetts isn’t hard, but finding the places people really care about takes patience. I’ve sat elbow to elbow in the North End, waited out a rainstorm for fried clams on the Cape, ...

The novel shuttles back and forth over more than half a century: ‘The past would not be past that easily.’ Serk dies in the opening pages, but his backstory rolls on – his early years in Japan, his ...