As children, Ava and her brother Fred were raised in a “free” environment. Their parents, progressive educators and followers of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believed children developed best without formal instruction or societal contraints. This, despite the fact that Fred was a child who clearly might have benefited from some kind of intervention. When the book opens, Ava, 32, has learned that her brother, 30, is being held in a county jail in upstate New York, alleged to have abducted a young boy and taken him into the woods. After several days’ search, the boy is found dead. Fred has always been different. If he’d ever been clinically evaluated, he might well have been given a diagnosis on the autism spectrum, but his parents didn’t believe in labeling or pathologizing human behavior, and never took him to a specialist. Now Ava feels impelled to try to piece together the story of what actually happened between the boy and Fred, convinced that she, and she alone, will be able to explain her brother in a way that allows the rest of the world to regard him with sympathy.

No Book but the World is about fathoming the unfathomable. It asks what obligation we have to reach out to someone who is difficult to love, or to try to understand the motivations behind another’s actions, and what means we have for doing so. It asks whether freedom is always desirable. And it challenges the idea that facts are our best tools for comprehending one another, proposing our emotions and imaginations might take us further.