Category: Fiction

Light and place and atmosphere: weathers and seasons beautifully described. This book is full of unusual words, elegant turns of phrase. Not much action, but the past: what we remember and how memory is true or false, the things we don’t see at all or the things we see wrongly, or the things we see…

A novel in vignettes, in prose-poems: a novel told from the viewpoint of a Czech city, and so containing flashes of the lives of its inhabitants. The city in question is Most, a mining town that was “literally relocated to get to the brown coal beneath it,” as the flap-copy explains. “Sometimes I feel like…

This weekend I heard someone talk about how much she dislikes Fingersmith, because the deceit bothers her. The layers of deceit were precisely what made that book compelling for me: compelling enough to read it from start to finish on one long plane ride. But I can understand feeling that there’s something sordid about a…

Two girls, and a winter landscape: the hard ground, white rime, “steel-ice” and snow that blankets everything. Dream-logic, repetition, “the play between what has been and what is to come” (p 86). Reading this book makes me want to re-read Acts of Levitation by Laynie Browne, which would, I’m sure, make me want to read…

Narrative restraint; a narrator who’s unreliable because memory is unreliable, and memory that’s unreliable for so many reasons —distance, pride—and what happens when that unreliability affects everyday events, when it affects what happens now and not just how we remember things. This is an elegant book, a quiet book, also perhaps a sad book, in…

This is a beautifully designed volume: the pink flowers on the otherwise dark cover, the wine-colored endpapers, the elegant type, the rough edges of the pages. The stories it contains are clever and pleasing and good for quiet autumn or winter evenings: “On Lickerish Hill,” (a reworking of the Tom Tit Tot story) and “Mrs.…

Absorbing, beautiful, detailed & precise in descriptions of everything from emotional states to the mechanics of bridge-building to the many herbs and spices that can be used to flavor gin. And the sense of place, the 18th-century New York family names that linger as place-names, street-names: Joralemon, Sands, Boerum, Schermerhorn, Luquer. I found myself daydreaming…

Wit and cleverness and social climbing and downfall: an epic that’s “a novel without a hero,” just so much hypocrisy and dissatisfaction.

Such a pleasing novel, a story of Boston in the early 20th century, Boston in the influenza epidemic of 1918, bits of the past and bits of the present, songs and newspaper articles, how different people see the same events, and oh, streetcars and accents and imagining how streets were different a hundred years ago,…

Long highways connecting the countryside, connections between places, connections between people. The sense of a vague and shadowy world: a world the narrator doesn’t know, not really, and a world that the reader can’t know, either. This book is about love and sadness, the relentlessness of motion and distance, how the past is lost to…