Elettra and I had still only been dating when we bought the land, and though Joanie loved the overgrowth, the wildness of it, she had suggested wryly we might need to shop around for a backhoe. She also deemed it foolish, signing a mortgage with someone you were not married to. Dreams are oftentimes foolish. For as long as I could remember, I had wanted a place in the woods full of tattered books to be read for the hundredth time and soft, cuddly pets and without any schedules or demands. I didn’t want to see any uninvited soul for days. Elettra wanted the same. We bought our 5-acre hideaway, and I proposed to Elettra on a craggy ledge backed by a brush-covered mountain. At our engagement party, which Joanie had been well enough to plan and attend that December, I told everyone the house would be ready in about nine months. As Elettra’s family became my family, I figured we could wait out the construction together.
Then one day in January, after we moved in, Joanie climbed into the hospital bed we had installed in the living room, and another kind of waiting began.
In the city, then, for the surrealists and other “modernists of the street,” every aimless step counts—precisely because it cannot be counted. The more aimless the better …
What to do with all of this anxiety?
That question hangs over Charles Baxter’s tense, wry and ultimately touching new novel, “The Sun Collective,” which vividly recreates the oscillating sense of dread familiar to anyone who hasn’t spent the last four years in a coma, or in Canada.
How much do we really know ourselves and each other? These questions linger long after the final pages of this supremely intelligent collection.
The science and story of the V-2 furnish the backdrop for the latest novel by Robert Harris, his 14th. Like “Enigma,” “Munich” and “Fatherland,” “V2” is another swiftly paced thriller that blends fiction with the facts of World War II. Running alongside the well-known history of the German rocket is the hidden tale of Britain’s attempt to stymie the rocket attacks — with algebra.
Anyone who knows the history of current events in Syria won't be surprised to learn that the secret library doesn't survive, nor do all of those young men. The story of the secret library, however, is preserved in this slim, vivid account, when so much else in Daraya has turned to dust.