Category: Fiction

The flap copy of this book calls it a “haunting literary thriller” that’s a “deft portrait of a city in transition” and “a hymn to the joys of urban exploration.” It has moments of being all those things, but I’d say it’s mostly a thriller, which isn’t a genre I really read. Maybe that means…

I like the humor and atmosphere of A Long Way from Verona, which is basically a coming-of-age story set in England about a year into WWII. The thirteen-year-old narrator, Jessica Vye, is solitary and quirky: she starts off by saying she is “not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine”…

This book, for me, felt right on the edge of being twee in a kind of off-putting way. But it wasn’t: it was whimsically charming. It’s really two short books, the first of which is about Jasper Gwyn, a successful author who decides that he’s going to stop writing and publishing books, and who announces…

Half a Crown was compulsively readable, the kind of book that had me staying up past my bedtime, sitting on the edge of the bathtub reading after I’d brushed my teeth, reluctant to put it down. It also had me repeatedly wailing, “This is terrible!” to my boyfriend, who read this a few months ago.…

This quiet novella, which originally appeared in Japanese in 2001, is the story of a couple in their thirties who live in a suburban-ish neighborhood of Tokyo in the late 1980s, in a rented cottage that used to be a mansion’s guesthouse. Their cottage is next to an alley, and a neighbor across the alley…

I picked up this book because of the flap copy, which starts like this: “This book is unique as no other novel can claim to be: one of 109,027,350,432,000 possible variations of the same work of fiction.” As the flap copy goes on to explain, the book “comprises ten chapters, and the fifteen pairs of…

Pietr the Latvian, which was originally published in serial form in French in 1930, is the first of Georges Simenon’s novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, and is the first of Simenon’s novels that I’ve read. It’s no cosy mystery: it’s a gritty police procedural (albeit light on procedure) that moves back and forth between…

Landline was a fun, quick, funny read for me: I finished it in one delicious Saturday, and kept interrupting my boyfriend’s TV-watching to read him parts I liked. The book is the story of a marriage having a rough patch, or maybe it’s been having a rough patch for a while. Georgie McCool is in…

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…