Written in the first person by a woman who finds her place as a convenience store worker, this short, satirical novel is full of wit and brings the reader a unique character. Keiko has found home in her employment, where the rules are laid out in a manual, whereas she has found the expectations of behavior in the wider world bewildering. Comical, dark, and poignant, it is well worth a read.
For me, to open a book by Andrea Barrett is a treat—well-crafted, intelligent writing; interesting, complex characters; an intimate story. Added to that, for me, at least some of her characters have an interest in the natural sciences. The narrator of the story is not disclosed until the ending, and this disclosure, in itself, amplifies the story and reveals Barrett’s craftsmanship.
In the fall of 1916, America prepares for war-but in the isolated community of Tamarack Lake, the focus is on the sick. Wealthy tubercular patients live in private cure cottages; charity patients, mainly immigrants, fill the large public sanatorium. Prisoners of routine, they take solace in gossip, rumor, and-sometimes-secret attachments. But when the well-meaning efforts of one enterprising patient lead instead to a tragic accident and a terrible betrayal, the war comes home, bringing with it a surge of anti-immigrant prejudice and vigilante sentiment.
Andrea Barrett masterfully sets this luminous novel in a historical period of great progress in science…
An imaginative, entertaining futuristic escapade with unpredictable twists and quirky, complex characters that yet explores some important questions about the importance of individual species and how we spend our lives.
A dark and witty story of environmental collapse and runaway capitalism from the Booker-listed author of The Teleportation Accident.
The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never…
Lizzy has largely retreated from the world: she tends her adopted strays and goes to work, but she has forsaken lifelong pastimes and declines invitations from old friends. On the day she buries Happy, the abandoned basset hound she adopted years before, she learns a real estate developer is threatening the heart of her rural community—a tranquil pond and a relict stand of hemlocks. For Lizzy this is a magical place, hidden from the modern world.
Coaxed by an old friend to join a group fighting the development, Lizzy is reluctant—she wants to avoid both hope and him. But she realizes she can no longer keep the outside world at bay. As the battle over the development unfolds, Lizzy opens herself to two young neighbors who share her love of the natural environment—an awkward sixteen-year-old and an inquisitive ten-year-old. And as Happy’s elements return to the earth, Lizzy experiences her own transformation as buried memories find their way to the surface in increasingly curious ways.
