Imagine that you’re right in the prime of life – 30 years old—and discover that you are living under the shadow of Huntington’s Disease, a degenerative disorder that killed your father and will destroy your body and then your mind.

As you’re struggling to cope, you come across a letter from your now deceased father to the world chess champion Alexsandr Beztov who is now on a quixotic quest to unseat Russia’s Vladimir Putin. In it, your father asks for guidance on what to do when the enormous certainty is upon you that you are playing a losing match? You have nothing left to lose, so you travel to Russia to unearth the answer and eventually realize that both you and Alexsandr are searching for some of the same answers, for different reasons.

This is, perhaps, one of the freshest and most imaginative debuts I’ve read lately, and Jennifer DuBois approaches it with grace and thoughtfulness. Some of her prose – truisms, really, stated in the most eloquent ways – tackle that all-important question of why we live at all if we know we cannot win. She writes with a hard-won maturity that most people who are twice her age have not yet gleaned.

Take this observation for example: “Personality is continuity. Personality is the myth of continuity. And the person is lost when nothing an be old to him, when nothing can be familiar, when all parallels, all symbols, all analogs are lost; when the world is perpetually stunning; when we are all newborns again, at last.” Or this one: “I thought about what Aleksandr had said about chess, about the paralyzing effects of imagination. I knew that to be true. Any time I let my mind wander more than three steps into the future, it reached the limits of comprehension and fell off the edge.”

If prose like this appeals to you, then you must read this book. Narrated in the first person by Irina, the young woman with Huntington’s, and by the one-time chess prodigy Alexsandr, Partial History is rich with description of the USSR in the 1980s; the dreariness, the poverty, the paranoia, the overriding political considerations.

There are some missteps that keep Partial History from quite reaching a 5-star rating (although it’s close enough that I am rating it that way). The novel soars when the questions are the most lofty: how to move forward when the odds are stacked against you. When tackling the Soviet bureaucracy, the narrative tends to slow and the sinister and illegal activities seem to be drawn with too fine a point.

Still, from start to finish, the book is beautifully plotted with an organic ending, the writing is luscious in many instances, and the themes manage to be universal and original at the same time. It’s wonderful to see a debut author take literary chances and reveal the wisdom of the human heart and its courage under fire.