It might be the best opening line of a novel this year: “The week I shot a man clean through the head started like any other.”

That’s how Emma Stonex’s “The Sunshine Man” starts. Her followup to “The Lamplighters” (a book club favorite — or at least, a favorite of my book club) alternates between two perspectives. One is the person who’s speaking in that opening line: Birdie, a British woman who’s so focused on her violent plan that she barely pauses to tell us that she has a husband and kids waiting at home. The other is Jimmy, a small-time hood who gets out of jail as the book opens — which we know because Birdie, who believes Jimmy killed her sister, is surveilling him.

“The Sunshine Man,” the title of which refers to a frightening scarecrow in the small town where both Birdie and Jimmy grew up, sounds like a thriller in its description and there are thriller elements, but Stonex is more interested in the invisible dividing lines that separate haves from have-nots. Birdie, who was abandoned by her mother and raised by her grandmother, didn’t grow up with much but she was loved and she has had a good life. Jimmy, who moved in with Birdie’s family for part of his youth, has not known love and, perhaps as a result, has followed a path constricted by poverty and want.

Their contrasting stories raise lots of compelling moral issues: Can we triumph over difficult circumstances? Why are some people able to change their lives for the better while others are not? Is happiness a matter of luck or hard work? Nature or nurture? (Jimmy barely knows his daughter, Donna, who has had a better time than her dad and who tries to help him but fears getting dragged into his bleak worldview).

Stonex’s prose isn’t as spare or pregnant with meaning as Flannery O’Connor’s (no one’s is) but she shares with O’Connor an interest in the moments that define our lives. O’Connor’s work reflected her Catholic faith and belief in the promise of redemption. Stonex, on the other hand, doesn’t talk much about religion but her characters grapple openly with issues of right and wrong.

Birdie’s grandmother, for instance, is almost saintly in her insistence that Birdie and her sister must treat everyone, especially the less fortunate, with kindness and understanding. Even so, she admits to Birdie that she often wonders if she did something wrong, how she raised a daughter who abandoned her children. And Birdie wonders if something she did as an infant led her mom to ditch her.

That probably makes the book sound more painful than it is. Stonex’s parallel narratives make it a suspenseful read, with two main characters who are compellingly flawed. As their fates braid together, “The Sunshine Man” suggests the two could learn a lot from each other. The question is: Will they get a chance to?

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The Sunshine Man

By: Emma Stonex.

Publisher: Viking, 360 pages.

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