This is a very big book, large in sweep, characters, and connections; a remarkable achievement for a first novel and one which was honored by being long listed for the National Book Award in fiction.  The story takes place during the second Chechnya/Russian war with flashbacks to the first one spanning 1994-2004.  Chechnyans in a small village are connected in complex ways, primarily adultery providing a net of love and estrangement, betrayal and heroism.  The Russians are brutal torturers except for two Russian sisters whose family was sent to colonize Chechnya in the 1940’s after the forcible relocation of the native population to Kazahkstan.  Sonia and Natasha, Akhmed, Dokka, and Ramzan (one informer and two disappeareds), Khassan (a WWII hero, traveler from Chechnya to Kasahkstan and back, and father or grandfather of most of the younger Chechyans), and Havaa, the 8 year old girl whose survival is the central thread of the story and whose future is spun out in a brief summary in the final pages.  Her life as a PhD in limnology, teaching in the US and surviving to 103 dedicating her book to Sonia and Natasha, to Akhmed and Dokka, is the glimmer of hope in this terribly depressing book about man’s inhumanity to man.  The title refers to a definition in Sonia’s medical dictionary, underlined at some point by the PSTD Natasha:  Life:  a constellation of vital phenomena—-organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.  All of these are admirably demonstrated in this excellent novel.  Any book that makes me cry like a baby is worth reading!