Story-wise, this is the fourteenth volume in the Jalna series, and the house is about a hundred years old. There is time to reflect here, so that when a new character, like Humphrey Bell, is introduced, readers are reminded of all the other characters who have lived in his
Talk of The Painted Drum (2005), The Plague of Doves (2008) and Shadow Tag (2010) in under 300 words each, with an eye to finishing a project. The Painted Drum is one of Erdrich’s accessible novels (I also recommend The Last Miracles at Little No Horse and The Master Butchers Singing
Here, Eric inhabits a room like Carmela’s in “The Four Seasons”, in the Unwins’ home: the kind “assigned to someone’s hapless, helpless paid companions, who would have marvelled at the thought of its lending shelter to a dying man”. And Eric is dying, like the father in “The End
It’s been sixteen years since the matriarch Adeline died and her namesake is both daring enough to strip down and swim in a pool and old enough to catch the eye of a male cousin (who is perhaps a little over-interested in her bathing). But overall, Mazo de la
So many of Mavis Gallant’s characters inhabit between spaces. Netta, too. Which is strange, because so many of Mavis Gallant’s other itinerant women are staying in hotels, but Netta is running one. And she is just as between as the rest of them. Once she said yes and, then,
