Category: Fiction

Memory and absence are at the center of this novel: the narrator, Jessa-Lynn, is dealing (or not dealing) with her father’s death, and also with the absence from her life of her first/only love, Brynn (who’d been close with Jessa and her brother, Milo, since they were all kids, and who later ended up marrying…

On a companion website for this book, there’s a quote from Thomas Merton’s journals that includes the phrase “I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place,” which I like a lot (I should really read more by Merton one of these days) and which feels very…

One of the rules of Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children (a boarding school for children who have travelled to other worlds but have been forced back to the world they were born in, which is our world) is “No quests” (15). But rules sometimes get broken, and this is definitely a quest narrative. Jack…

I’d been meaning to read Open City since it came out in 2011; I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to it. Reading this in 2021 was interesting: we’re nearly two decades on from 9/11 now, and lines about disaster and epidemics have a different resonance, after 2020: at one…

“The world is suffused with perfect nonsense. Sometimes it is completely implausible.” So says the narrator of The Nose, which is, I think, the first thing I’ve read by Gogol. It’s been a while since I’ve read any of the Melville House “Art of the Novella” series – I used to get them at the…

At the start of The Enchanted April it’s a rainy day in London (the kind of day where you look out the window and see “extremely horrible sooty rain falling steadily on the hurrying umbrellas and splashing omnibuses”), and Lotty Wilkins, who is not looking forward to finishing her shopping and going home to have…

Philadelphia Fire isn’t so much about the 1985 bombing (by the police) of the MOVE house on Osage Avenue (though that did happen, and does figure in the plot) as it is about struggles and failures and failings, and maybe especially failed ideals. The book’s epigraph is a quote from William Penn saying that each…

If my Goodreads shelving is accurate, it’s been three years since I last read a mystery, or at least, three years since I read a mystery that wasn’t middle-grade or YA—which sort of surprises me and sort of doesn’t. Sometimes mysteries are totally my thing; sometimes they feel too plot-driven. And I didn’t love the…

This was the first Woolf I ever read, and it’s still a pleasure to re-read. I’d remembered some of the prose but forgotten some of the story and structure, the way that the narrative jumps from one character to another as their paths cross on a single day in London in June, 1923. I remembered…

In general, I would say I’m drawn to novels that are tightly focused on a single character; when a story is described as “sprawling” I feel like it’s probably not going to be the book for me. I also don’t read a lot of historical fiction (and when I do, it’s more likely to be…