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THE NAMES is not merely a remarkable and deeply moving debut novel: it's the sort of heartbreakingly beautiful book that even writers with two dozen books behind them rarely produce. The premise is daring: how would changing a child's name change a whole family's destiny? So, Florence Knapp has written, in essence, three extraordinary novellas about one family, and how Cora's decision to name her second child Bear, Julian, or Gordon, unleashes wildly different lives for him, his sister, his father, and (of course) herself. Knapp has not merely designed an extraordinary architecture for her novel, she is also a stylist of uncommon talent, with sentences that left me staggered by their perfect rhythms and dialogue that was always spot-on. This book is riveting and whip-smart. Read it. You'll thank me.