Are our lives ruled by destiny or chaos? J.W. Ironmonger (The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder) examines this question from every angle in his heady, seductive new novel, Coincidence.
On Midsummer's Day, 1982, three-year-old Azalea Ives is found wandering around a fairground in Devon, England. She is turned over to social services and eventually adopted by Luke and Rebecca Folley, but this is hardly the end of Azalea's story. A year later, the badly decomposed body of a woman is discovered on a beach in North Devon. A policeman wonders if the child and the woman--both redheads--might be mother and daughter, but without any concrete way to prove it, the speculation is shelved.
Luke and Rebecca eventually take Azalea with them to a mission Luke's grandfather founded in Uganda. Joseph Kony, the real-life warlord and leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, attacks the mission and on Midsummer's Day, 1992, Azalea's adoptive parents meet their deaths.
Later, we meet Thomas Post, a lecturer in applied philosophy who is better known as "The Coincidence Man." When he and Azalea "meet" in a seemingly chance encounter, she wants to talk with him about the Midsummer's Day occurrences and her powerful belief that she knows the date of her death.
Kony's rebel army of kidnapped child soldiers is familiar to Ironmonger, a native of East Africa, but Coincidence does not become overly polemical or political. Instead, Ironmonger masterfully ties complicated plot elements together into a satisfying, plausible outcome. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.