New York, 1911. Gustav Mahler’s recent tenure conducting the New York Philharmonic has been an extraordinary success and a time of feverish artistic defiance. He is arguably the most celebrated musician alive. In America, however, his compositions have turned more inward-looking, for he knows, or suspects, that death is near.

The Fifth Year follows a five-year-old girl, Marili, through each season of a single year on her grandparents’ farm in the mountains of Austria. Her grand-mother is a quiet, melancholic woman; her grandfather, with his calm, cheerful disposition, radiates warmth. Marili’s parents have presumably died in the war, and she is left to discover-with curiosity, wonder, and fear-the beauty and...

Shipwrecks and border pushbacks; epidemics and industrial ruins; a family separated by economic necessity; a brother lost to crime; love and fear and memories of happier times in Berlin—yet through it all runs a silver thread of hope spun by a far-off friend. Every Time We Say Goodbye is an extended soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition, and failure, and...