Category: Fiction

My boyfriend often teases me about how I like really little books, and I always protest that I like books of varying lengths/sizes, but there is something appealing about a little book that’s easy to slip into a purse. The Door in the Wall by H.G. Wells is a Penguin Mini Modern Classic, and it’s…

The City in the Middle of the Night is set in the future on January, a tidally-locked planet settled by humans after Earth has become uninhabitable. It’s a harsh world: half frozen night, half boiling day, with a narrow twilight range where people live in the two main cities, Xiosphant and Argelos, one of which…

Spring, which is the third book in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, is one of those books with two intersecting storylines where I was initially sad when the perspective shifted, because I liked the first storyline so much and wasn’t sure how the rest of the book could compare. But this is Ali Smith, so I…

French Exit is described on the title page as “a tragedy of manners,” which is apt. It’s a dark/funny/darkly funny novel about Frances Price, a (formerly) very rich widow who, at the age of sixty-five, has burned through all the money in her husband’s estate and finds herself having to move to a friend’s apartment…

At first, I was worried that Conversations with Friends was going to be the kind of novel where a) cheating is a plot point but b) no one ever considers the possibility of non-monogamy. I’m happy to report that it is not that kind of novel, and also happy to report that it’s really really…

In an Absent Dream is the fourth book in Seanan McGuire’s “Wayward Children” series, and gives us the backstory of Lundy, a character from the first book. Lundy, like the other characters in this series, goes through a magic portal to another world when she’s a child. The world she goes to is the Goblin…

Near the end of Crudo, the book’s protagonist, Kathy, is having a conversation about plagiarism, which doesn’t concern her, and we get this: “You take what you find, it’s all material, I mean what is art if it’s not plagiarising the world?” (121). Which is a pretty good thesis statement for the novel as a…

Early in Jane Gardam’s 1977 novel, Bilgewater, Marigold Daisy Green describes herself as a “strange, thick-set, hopeless adolescent, friendless and given to taking long idle walks by the sea” (11). She’s good at chess and math, started reading quite late (but loved being read to, and quotes Keats and Chaucer and Coleman and Blake), is…

My reading experience of How to be both felt slower and more scattered than I would like—I started it while getting ready to move, and finished it after moving, and there was a lot of packing and unpacking boxes and generally being stressed in between—but it’s Ali Smith, and I pretty much always think she’s…

This book, which was originally published in Japan in 1988, contains two pieces, a novella and a story, or a novella and a shorter novella. “Kitchen”, the first piece, is the longer of the two; “Moonlight Shadow” is shorter. They’re both about love and loss and grief and loneliness and hope and connection, and I…