I am fascinated by the fact that reality is often so bizarre, so unlikely, or so ridiculous, that you can’t get away with portraying it in fiction. Because … it’s unrealistic! Nobody will believe it. The truth is—and I’ve had this conversation with other lawyers and recently, over drinks, with a psychiatrist I met at a party—the truth is that, when it comes to human behaviour, everything is realistic, everything’s been done or will be done. Apart from really convenient coincidences in the plot, nothing is unrealistic! And we know even those really happen. But I wouldn’t use them. Even though they’re real. But in the real world, nothing is so far-fetched, so over-the-top, that it has not happened or won’t happen—as we’ve learned from observing the political scene over the last, say, five years.
“Winter Recipes from the Collective,” Louise Glück’s first poetry collection since winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 2020, feels as much like an ending as it does a beginning. The poems are elegiac, brooding and death-obsessed, haunted by intimations of mortality, by ghosts facing backward with regret and forward with trepidation. It is an end-of-life book, where the life in question could be anyone’s: the poet’s, the reader’s, the planet’s.
Hannah Kent describes her new novel, Devotion, as “a gift to my younger, queer, closeted-as-hell self”. If only we all knew how to be so kind to our former selves, to salve old wounds with such grace and light. For Kent has written herself a love story: a death-defying, God-toppling love story.
The moments in Devotion that stick are simple and intimate: a cheek against a pale trunk; two girls side by side, “the entirety of the universe ending at the periphery of [their] curled limbs”. It is a love story, ardent and wholesome, and it drapes its reader in lush historical detail. Fans will find a lot to savour.