Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

This book is odd.  I picked it up because it was on the New York Times 100 Notable Books list for 2012--i had neither heard of the book nor the author before, and it was a very pleasant surprise.  There is a thread of myticism that runs through the narrative, and contributes to the main story in a way that is significant and innovative.

While there are many tales woven in and out of various times throughout the book, if the book were to been seen as having a central story, it belongs to Jaz (short for Jaswinder) Matharu, the son of Punjabi immigrants, and his wife Lisa, a Jewish woman from Long Island who worked in publishing before their son was born. That son, named Raj, has been diagnosed with severe autism, and the difficulty of raising him has strained the marriage; when we first meet the couple, they’re on a “healing vacation” near Joshua Tree National Park. When they finally visit the nearby desert, they come upon a formation called the Pinnacle Rocks. And there, Raj disappears.

That is the turning point of the book, which takes another turn when months later, he just appears again, on a military installment near where he initially went missing.  Jaz and Lisa have very different responses to their son's dissapearance and then reappearance, and it is a fascinating and not altogether answered mystery.