This is a superb book.  “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” has a main storyline: In a tiny village in Chechnya in 2004, Akhmed, an incompetent doctor, takes his neighbor Dokka’s daughter, Havaa, in search of safety after her father has been disappeared and their house burned down.  They walk to the hospital, where a tough woman named Sonja is the head surgeon–and one one of two employees.  Sonja has enough to worry about without taking on the care of an 8-year old girl, and when she’s not amputating limbs, she’s […]