People were drinking wine out of plastic cups. The chairs were pushed close together. Bags were tucked under feet. I sat on the bookshop stage with two other writers, ready to read our ghost stories. Before we began, the moderator asked, “Do you believe in ghosts?” After a pause, we spoke of doubt. Creepy incidents were related. I found myself saying that perhaps the dead might be watching us.
I’ve never seen a soul move through the air. I am not sure that we are anything more than a skin-bag of electrical impulses. But ghosts are different from the other uncanny citizens. They are only one step away from the known. To become a ghost, you don’t have to be bitten by a vampire or receive a curse or encounter a mad scientist or fall under the spell of a full moon. All you have to do is die.
Moriarty tells a great story, understands her characters and cares about them, too. Readers who have kept up with her books will adore “Apples Never Fall,” and readers just discovering Moriarty will seek out her previous titles after savoring this fresh, juicy tale.
Moving into a world of paranoia and intrigue, with a piercing critique of contemporary Western society at heart, we become involved in an affecting story that switches perspectives and brings the tenderness of friendship and the post-apocalyptic dystopia in line with Rajneesh’s critique into focus.
Neither of these titles includes the word “globalization” or even “global,” though the knitting together of the world is in fact the subject of both of them. The terms related to things global are now so clichéd that it is almost a relief not to have them brandished again. Yet what could be more vital to the interweaving of the world’s regions than credit or the movement of people? Rather than trace them, as is often the fashion, through the analysis of big data, which means statistical information gathered primarily by states, the authors of these two remarkable books approach their topics in ways that are at once traditional and original. They each begin with something seemingly small—a family, a signed slip of paper—and show how these open up much wider worlds.