Category: Fiction

The Paying Guests is part romance, part crime story, but isn’t only either of those things: the first book Waters mentions in her Author’s Note is Nicola Humble’s The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism, and I wonder how this book reads to someone who has read a lot of the…

Can’t and Won’t is made up of five numbered sections, each containing between twenty-three and twenty-six pieces, for a total of one hundred and twenty two pieces, many but not all of which are quite short. I really like the everydayness of these stories, and their crispness, and their humor, and how poignant some of…

Full Fathom Five is the third book of Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, and it’s definitely my favorite, partly but not entirely because it features repeat characters from the first two books in addition to entirely new ones. I like that each book so far has been set in a different place in the world Gladstone…

“I must accept this fate of being abandoned and betrayed; I must accept my helplessness. There’s no way for me not to lose. There’s nothing I can do for myself” (50). So writes the narrator of Last Words from Montmartre, in one of the twenty-one numbered letters that make up the bulk of the text…

In this 2003 piece in the Guardian, Susan Hill is quoted as saying this: “It’s not plot that interests me, but setting, people in a setting, wrestling with an abstract subject.” So it’s apt that the atmosphere and setting of this book were what made it a pleasure for me to read, while the plot,…

Ha’penny is set in the same world as Farthing (an alternate 1940s England in which WWII ended with a peace treaty and Hitler is still in power in Germany) and takes place shortly after that book ends. The structure is similar, with chapters of first-person narrative alternating with chapters of third-person narrative. Some of the…

One of the things I like most about The Magicians and The Magician’s Land is the way they play with the tropes of myth and fantasy and quest narratives, the way that the quests in those books are never entirely straightforward, the way that a world in which magic exists is not necessarily a world…

Farthing is a satisfying English-country-house murder-mystery set in an alternate 1949 in which England made peace with Hitler in 1941, and now exists across the Channel from the Third Reich. The book alternates, chapter by chapter, between the first-person narrative of Lucy Kahn, at whose parents’ house the murder takes place, and a third-person narrative…

This collection of linked stories set in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen in the ’70s and ’80s does a great job of capturing a sense of place. The narrator of the first story puts it like this: “I remember all this vividly, our summer nights, but really, all I can recall is what it felt…

In her preface to this reprint of her first novel, which was originally published in 1930, Kay Boyle writes that “the meaning of the book may perhaps be that there is always in life the necessity to choose,” which isn’t my favorite moral: I mean, yes, but sometimes the choice you get to make is…