Absence

by Issa Quincy

An elusive narrator is beguiled by a poem that returns to him in mysterious ways, echoing across the years. He recounts memories and impressions as they float fleetingly to the surface of his an eccentric and beloved schoolteacher leaves behind a dark secret after his death; a woman lays the table for a son she knows will never return home; a young man, the pariah of his family, finds solidarity and the distant call of freedom in the letters of an estranged Aunt; a black and white photograph tells of another family, afflicted with generations of tragedy.

These are some of the people and stories that haunt the pages of Absence. This hypnotic novel is a stirring evocation of the limitless depth of the present - a symphony subtly constructed out of the murmurs, memories and phantoms that add up to an ordinary human life.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Contemporary, British Literature, Literature

166 pages, Paperback

Published July 15, 2025

Reviews

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine memory like a cloud. It holds no specific shape but constantly shifts, evolving with us as we grow. Our memories are not mirrors reflecting back to us our experiences of the world, but rather memories are like windows through which we experience everything that comes after.

Issa Quincy mines the rich and intensely personal experiences of an individual life through the memories of his unnamed narrator. This is a profound and skillful debut that blew me away; one that compelled me to start reading it all over again the minute I turned the very last page.

In each section of this novel the wisps of a memory emerge from the fog of the narrator's existence, often spurred by the appearance of an object or spontaneous memory of a conversation with an old acquaintance. The narrator leads us down the rabbit trail of these memories, sometimes even nesting memories within memories for a multilayered and archaeological dig into the things we remember and the things we forget. He excavates the past, watching memories blow in and out like sand across the surface of a long forgotten structure, hollowed out but not completely lifeless.

We begin with the narrator recalling a poem from a small yellow book his mother would read to him as a child. That poem will appear again to him throughout his life creating tentpole moments around which his narrative circles. Conversations with a Boston bus driver, an Indian landlord in London, a childhood teacher, and the family friend of his godfather are woven together into a tale that spans decades of his life but feels as though we are experiencing it all as a flip-through of a family photo album.

Quincy's prose calls to mind the nostalgic atmosphere of many of Ishiguro's work. He has the ability to lead you down long, winding sentences that circle back on themselves in a way that feels revelatory, not repetitive. I read and re-read sentences for their sheer beauty, but also because, especially on re-read, certain elements, phrases, or asides seemed to connect and reveal their deeper meaning on closer inspection. It's subtly sophisticated--a book that you can read in one big gulp, but then go back to like poetry and absorb slowly.

There are too many quotes for me to put here, so just trust me when I say that Issa Quincy can WRITE. I tabbed and underlined in this 144 page book more than some twice or three times its length. Fans of reflective, interior writing will LOVE this one.

If this is Quincy's debut I can only imagine where he will go from here. This is absolutely one of, if not THE, best books I've read this year. It's a staggeringly beautiful reminder that life is both long and short, that our memories and experiences will fade, but as long as we exist in the head of another person we live on in some way.

[Katia N]

A man is searching to find the traces of himself in the stories of others; to recover forgotten memories and the sides of his self he might not consciously aware of. All of this in the context of the history happening to the wider global world.W.G. Sebald was a trailblazer for this type of fiction. Many has followed. The author seems to join the tribe with this book.

The novel contains fewer than a dozen of relatively independent 'episodes'. Each episode is composed with stories within the stories, nested narrators occasionally more than two steps removed from the main events of an episode and of course the listeners. The main narrator, our protagonist, does not talk much himself and unites them all. This technique, also used by Sebald, is quite difficult to carry out with elegance. Initially carried away by the relative fluency of the narration, i have not appreciated this difficulty here. Or rather, i could not quite specify what was the cause of my lack of enthusiasm for the narrative style.

But so happened that I’ve interrupted reading this novel to read Into the light, a new story by Rachel Cusk just published in Yale review (recommended for the fans of her recent books). She often uses this technique as well and this short story is not an exception. But Cusk does it effortlessly and elegantly. She does not have a formal separation of her imbedded narratives instead managing to create an authentic feeling of a polyphony of the carefully voiced layers akin mixing a few musical instruments into the same composition. In this novel the author is using simple italics in majority of cases to separate his internal narrators. The tool seems to be quite blunt in comparison and it does not always allow the pieces to blend into the whole of the text in the same measure.

However, the writing itself is of a high, almost meditative quality. The sentences are sparse and poetic. And the stories are moving. Also there is this kind of unwordiness (have a just made a word?) in the text: the feeling of some elusive presence, a shadow cast into the words by an essence beyond that verbal reality. The presence emanating through the absence. Can it be that the title of the novel stems from this feeling somehow? This has reminded me of a line by Mirza Ghalib, an Urdu poet: ‘The absent of the absent: what we see is merest seeming. It is the dream into which we awaken from dreaming.’. It is rare that i happen to have this feeling while reading a piece of prose. Maybe Lispector comes to mind. However I experience such an unworldly presence more often with reading a poetry or looking at a painting. Maybe this is explained by the fact that the author is the poet as well. On occasion, some fragments of the text were like poems in prose. This one i loved:

Present again, there in that space as all those thoughts: the images of my father so many years prior, the bleached and ravaged land of Tunisia and the thought of Hamed’s jacket, stitched and restitched, re-patterned and reformed, all receded into the depths of my mind and upwards from beneath time’s black water, through the unending greyness from over the whitish and shorn hills and through the mist of spring rains, I appeared but only for a short period of time before I vanished again beneath the distant and echoing words of another elsewhere.
...

In this pendulous movement, from the daintiest of threads, between
absence and presence, between voice and erasure, I am reminded of people and spaces, names and dates, all as words to which I listened. And now, like those distant and ancient spirits from the East who once moved above gardens as ghostly stewards of the birds and the trees, I am free to float back through them. Floating so silently, without ever having to utter a word. Only to inspect, once more, those who lingered on the sharp edge of a shattering scream and a heavy silence before being erased forever by the dark clouds of oblivion...

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point in space, the poet sees everything that happens in one point in time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighbouring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-grey sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur - all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.”
~ Vladimir Nabokov in “Speak, Memory”

Butterfly-hunting Nabokov would have relished this book.

Dizzying. Atmospheric. Hypnotic. Proustian.

Do you recall the strange, overpowering vertigo you sometimes feel when sifting through old photographs or letters from strangers in an antique store? As if, for just a few seconds, you are falling through a crack in space and time, witnessing a life that is absent but most definitely present and eerily alive in your hands at that very moment?

Whose ghost will you be in one hundred years?

An unnamed narrator remembers a mysterious ballad that his mother used to read to him when he was little, growing up in England. This memory sets off a chorus of vignettes, entanglements and recollections from other characters in his life, strangers, coworkers, neighbors, friends and family, all opening and closing into each other like a delicate set of Russian dolls.

A Scheherazade-like unspooling of humanity, from all corners of the world, where the dead and the disappeared, the forgotten and the banished, the brave and the misfits are all but one thing: the absent who are never not right there, right by our side. In our memories, which we then (try to) speak.

There is simply no way I can pin this rare butterfly down.
So I’m going to let it flutter and hope you decide to try and catch it.

This is a small book of vertiginous beauty.

[Reader]

The use of the word “sat” instead of “sitting” is colloquial English used in the UK for those who are too ignorant to know that.

[Liz Hein]

I would need to read this entire thing again to fully understand all Quincy is pulling off here, but I feel comfortable saying this is my favorite first page of a novel I’ve ever read. It knocked me right out.

[Malou Moen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heel mooi!!! Duidelijk dat deze auteur dichter is

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Are you ever surprised by how much you love a book? Not because you doubted you would, but because how much you adore it surprises you? This is that book for me. I love it. It checks all the boxes that make a book perfect for me: the writing is strong, poetic and beautiful; the form adds interest; and it’s a simple yet layered chronicle of the weight and the joy of life.

Absence opens with the narrator reflecting on his childhood and a poem his mother read him to lull him to sleep. The main theme, as expected given the title, is absence, which is explored through memory. Quincy conveys the joy of memories, the complexity of the ones we retain and lose, and those that are hidden or we are unaware of until something brings them into our consciousness. I love the way Quincy captures how erratically memories come to us; often with no rhyme or reason or completely out of context. I also love how Quincy explored how absence can often be a catalyst for connecting with others.

The narrative felt slow, methodical, and deliberate. The writing is beautiful in a way that the emotion seeps from the page, depicting the weight of being human, the ache of memory and loss, connections made and severed, and of people on the fringe. I appreciate how Quincy uses form to add depth to this work; moving back and forth in time, italics to denote different voices, and letters. He also leaves things unresolved, raising questions that go unanswered and giving the reader a more active role in the experience by allowing them to draw their own conclusions.

There is a bit of a “six degrees of separation” vibe as unexpected connections are exposed. Some readers may shrug off the connections and coincidences as too contrived or convenient. Not me. I believe our existence is intertwined in ways just outside our field of vision, there but rarely witnessed, and Quincy brings them out into the light while conveying the heartbreak of missing them.

I love this book and strongly recommend it. I’m certain it will be one of my top reads this year. Thank you Two Dollar Radio for the #gifted ARC.

[Catherine Dorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I have thought about it and see how all my memory is eaten away and ravaged not by what I've forgotten but what I've remembered. What I want to know about is that which seems gone now. And what is there is of no use to me.”

A beautifully written meditation on what lingers after relationships both with those we only meet fleetingly and with loved ones long after they’re gone and the unexpected connections and commonalities that tie those disparate people and places together.

[Troy]

this was an okay read for me- the first couple of chapters (they’re more like short stories with the same narrator) i was invested but something happened midway and finishing was a bit of a slog. beautiful writing, but i personally couldn’t fully connect with it.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love forgetting how I found a book, and then absolutely devouring it. This is an impressive piece of writing, debut notwithstanding. Quincy has a strong grasp on atmosphere and tone, and the word selection is fabulous. The characters are so alive and full of emotional depth, and the loose manner of their connections was skillfully played out. I felt a deep sadness reading this, which likely results from my current existence, but even so Quincy does a masterful job writing about and around the realities of death, loss, and the precarity of human relationships. This is a powerful narrative from a gifted writer.

[Paolo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il titolo non mente, la fa da protagonista proprio l'assenza che permane nel linguaggio, in un luogo o in un'abitudine quando si viene inevitabilmente contaminati dal contatti con un'altra assenza, in una rete di sradicamenti e non detti che travalica le epoche, le nazioni e le persone, e Issa Quincy è bravo a mostrarne l'universalità in questo libro.
Probably nelle corde di chi ha apprezzato The White book di Han Kang.

[Max Mcgrath · Rating 2 out of 5]

Also found the insistence on using “sat” instead of “sitting” so forced

[Ana Medeiros · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,25 ⭐

[Sarah Snee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ending the year off with an absolute banger. This book deserves more of a thoughtful review so maybe I’ll come back and try it.

[Ellie · Rating 2 out of 5]

while this is a beautifully written and thematically strong book, i unfortunately found myself bored while reading it. i look back on it now and view it in a much more positive light, but i struggled to get through it despite how short it was. one of those books that just wasn’t for me, but if you have an interest in poetry and want to explore how grief impacts people’s lives, i actually do recommend this book.

[ash savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

heavy with nostalgia and grief, but so well written. several lines from this will stick with me long after reading

[Kira · Rating 5 out of 5]

A favourite read of the year. I’ve not seen many people talk about this, and it didn’t appear to have much publicity at the time of its release, but I hope the paperback publication sees it make its way into many more readers’ hands as this was so beautifully and skilfully crafted. Gathering a collection of connections and relationships from over the course of his life, no matter their longevity or lack thereof, and ruminating on their impact on his life, the narrator attempts to piece together parts of himself and an idea of home. I adored the characterisation and significance of the poem the narrator’s mother read to him as a child; the way it reoccurred throughout was always unexpected but never unwelcome. The coincidences and connections that we can find within different people and in different places our entire lives, is such a heartwarming message even when displayed amongst struggles and hardships. A thread of grief runs throughout but this book is not without hope or beauty. In time, I hope to read more from Quincy.

[Chass Coon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Absence was not on my radar until a bookstagrammer I follow raved about it. I appreciated the storytelling and the ways in which little snippets of life can transport us to childhood memories, but this was overall just an ok read to me. Each chapter felt too disjointed from the others. It was more like a collection of short stories that connected but only barely. I also got lost at times because the stories frequently were told by another person about another person. I kept having to re-trace who was who and how they connected to the main protagonist.

[Jessica O'Brien]

Either I’m not smart enough to unpack what this book is doing, or my brain cannot handle the heavily descriptive and (to me) complicated writing in this wildly chaotic time of my life. I wanted a book that would reflect my own feelings of how memories are elusive in grief, but I was just left frustrated by much of this writing.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw her as a little girl, who when she talked had to shake her head to still her thoughts, and who knew the stories so well of her mother and of her father. The same such stories that, over the years, have proliferated in me, and latched onto me; ones, as happens sometimes, that I cannot tear myself from; I cannot escape, no, they remain, even now, tangled in me and essentially so, as if they inexplicably sustain the very mechanism that causes each foot, each day to move in front of the other, and each breath to pull in only, at last, to release again.

Longlisted for the 2026 Dylan Thomas Prize – a prize for authors writing in English aged 39 and under (Thomas himself having died at that age) which is open to novels, short story collections, poetry collections and plays – one of seven novels this year (and one of only two I had not already read).

It is the debut novel of the British (but currently New York based) author – who appropriately for the prize has published both poems and short fiction.

The set up of the novel is the narrator – of whom we gain very little information other than either almost incidental or indirect (typically from the way he interacts with or interprets others) – examining the stories and memories of others with who he has interacted (and in many cases really focusing on the stories of those with which they in turn interacted) in six effectively distinct sections – which range across time but also geographically (from Algeria to Boston to England to Cyprus to Thailand) – all imbued with the memory of his departed mother (which begins with memories of her favourite poem that she often read to him).

I would describe the novel as Cuskian (with a strong sense of her annihilated perspective Outline trilogy – although the author himself has cleverly used the phrase “apophatic characterisation” to describe the treatment of the narrator), Proustian (with rather than Cusk’s present day encounters, the narrator remembering the stories of others often invoked by sights, sounds, smells), Sebaldian (both in the use of old photos, the narrator’s one time job as an archivist, in a section set on the English coast which used as the starting point for a cross-county story) and poetic (not just in its lyrical use of language but also in the poem – Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Goal” which explicitly underpins the novel). And the author has himself mentioned the inspiration of Bolano and Calvino (more in both cases in the multi-strand narrative).

And while this series of literary antecedents – some explicitly acknowledged by the author, others whose influence is very hard to miss – is impressive, I was not really clear that the author has yet really synthesised them into something cohesive and distinct – the novel read a little more to me like a collage and a patchwork stitching together of the works of others. But that may well be deliberate – an mental photo collage, and in a separate section a patchwork coat (one which is unstitched and then restitched using materials carefully assembled) are both key images in parts of the novel.

In terms of the sections: the first focuses on a teacher who mentored the narrator before resigning in haste – reencountering the teacher and a close acquaintance some 10 years later in much reduced circumstances – and then after his suicide taking a letter from him to someone he vaguely recollects from school who reveals he and the teacher had an under-age sexual relationship (and as an aside the rather non-judgemental almost sympathetic way in which the narrator treats this revelation will I think leave readers other than me rather uneasy).

The second short section is perhaps the least complex and most conventional – the stories of a bus driver he meets while working in a restaurant at an America bus terminal as well as the stories of others he encounters including the victims of the Opioid epidemic.

The third is a lengthy section about a young man Sulli with who he lodges – ostensibly the heir to a country wide convenience store, a neurological incident when he was younger seems to have been interpreted by his family as a curse and he is effectively hidden away from the family; but his story is really about his Aunt estranged from the rest of the family after a lesbian relationship in France and letter she writes to him after she suffers from mental illness (after the death of her lover – a death she blames on her family).

Note that both these sections (and the final one below) end with the characters having a link to the Wilde poem – the unlikeliness of which is perhaps the first sign of the artifice which underpins not just the micro-details of the novel (an implausible number of characters are named Patrick and Patricia) but also (as discussed below) its wider conception.

The fourth also long section takes place oddly mainly in Wendling (only a few miles from where I grew up and where almost all my family live – so coincidences do occur) and is based around a troubled ex- schoolfriend of his father who died young (the memories starting when the narrator thinks of a childhood photo of him taken at the wake he attended with his father). After the death of the young man’s father he visits a long term friend of the young man’s mother – who recounts both the troubled family history and at one stage at length some diaries which the man wrote while backpacking in Thailand – and here we start to sense the more macro-artifice – the novel consisting of an implausible level of separation, where the narrator will tell us of the memories of a person he meets of the memoires of another person (all produced in the sort of detail I think most of us might struggle with to remember in our own lives).

The fifth starts with his father – and a woman he met while on an out of season holiday in a almost deserted Algerian hotel and the life story of a mysterious black-chador dressed woman he meets there – a story reproduced (despite apparently being told to us two steps removed) in some ten pages of almost encyclopaedically-detailed reproduced speech. We also at one stage get a description of a mountain – which as far as I can tell is direct from the narrator who has only seen it in photos and which seems both overly wordy and artificial; “From a distance, the undulant crest of this slight range appears as no more than a thin swelling of darkness upwardly encroaching from some unknown face of the earth onto the wide and deboned sky; as inflamed red nodules on a pale-pink lung: aberrant and throbbing.”

And the sixth is a meeting with the daughter of his old family Doctor, the wife/mother of who was of uncertain Cypriot descent and the stories of annual trips father and mother took to Cyprus (as well as a story her mother told of someone caught up in some civil war atrocities).

The writing is beautiful but perhaps again, like both the use of literary-antecedents and the artifice too much, some examples – which also bring out the themes of the novel:

When I think back to It, or rather when the images resurface in me thoughtlessly, the disturbance I felt at seeing the towers I now know related less to the immediate structural nature of them and more to the looming symbolism of refuge, endless corridors and hidden lives consigned to the silently suffocating margins of this world. The feelings of imposition and silence, more cognate than we think, are ones that have haunted me since and continue to, even now. I believe that this nauseate moment as a young boy was the source of these sparring powers that have beleaguered my thinking since.

Without admitting too much, Margaret was trying to express to me both that words are never enough to understand the entirety of a thing: pieces are left out or forgotten and the weight and intensity of the reality pales under the infirmity of words. Words are often not enough for the speaker either; not only as a tool of expression but also as a means of making sense of the object of expression. In speaking, the insensible is often rendered into further insensibility and the chaotic is given only a brief form that ultimately remains incomprehensible.

After some time frozen in that odd position, Margaret slowly sharpened upwards again like a burgeoning stalk and disappeared into another room for many minutes. I remained alone, devoid of clear thought, as in me a number of distorted fragments attempted to assemble into something linear but found themselves repeatedly unable. An immense noise eddied in me, stirring that which was dormant and concealed. As I tried to still the motion, distilling the vast, rapidly turning collage into static and individual images in order to tether together the untethered, I found my mind lapsing into the same guiltless paralysis I experienced when sat alone at the wake, watching drunken mourners weep and embrace on a dance floor, and when a photographer beckoned to me and snapped a picture with a bright flash that both momentarily and everlastingly blinded me to that which had unravelled behind me, as well as to all that lay ahead.

Overall I have mixed views on this novel – undoubtedly a huge literary talent, but one that I think in the second novel I very much hope he writes and which I would immediately read, would be better to perhaps moderate the artifice and excesses of writing and further to cohere his influences into a more coherent as well as personal style. But I do think a worthy place on the longlist.

[Michelle (shareorshelve) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absence is a portrait of lives connected by memory, poetry, and tragedy.

It follows an unnamed narrator whose childhood poem, read to him by his mother, reappears in the stories of a range of characters he meets, each with their own secret.

The writing is poetic but never overwrought and combines nostalgia with philosophical insight. It’s an atmospheric and thoughtful debut that you should definitely consider reading.

[Prickly Edge · Rating 4 out of 5]

A multilayered exploration of memory; its fragility, its power. Interwoven strands that link lives told through stories told of stories told… beautiful written although sometimes with a touch too much effort

[Jacob Hoover]

BOOKER PRIZE PREDICTION READINGS #1

A novella (short story collection? I don’t know) about curiosity and reflection. The stories(?) were hit and miss, but the ones that were a hit I enjoyed, but were too short. The first story is about a teacher and his life out of school that shocks one of his now-grown students; I could have taken a full novel for that one. That’s really the only one that stuck out to me as a whole. I wonder if this would make it on the longlist or if it’s even being consider. I think it might be a bit too floaty for the prize (but here again Held was on the list last year.) overall shallow and predictable.

[Liselotte Howard · Rating 2 out of 5]

En sån där bok som alldeles självklart hamnar på ett gäng läsa-listor (inklusive Obamas). Och en som en därför självklart plockar upp. Därtill en sån en självklart fortsätter läsa för att språket kräver det.
Men som inte självklart är bra.
Eller, det finns säkert geniala saker här. Det poetiska, i minnena, i tomrummen mellan både minnen och ord; Avsaknader.
Men för mig blir den största avsaknaden den av dialog. Jag har svårt för återberättande texter som det är - här är det personer som återberättar andra personers återberättelser. Med följden att det finns en enorm distans till varenda karaktär och känsla.
Stjärnorna är för språket, inget annat.

[Nina El Shabrawy · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the fragments nature of memory is so beautifully gathered in this series of vignettes, the focus on the trauma and the death and the despair and silence of it all seems a little darker than need be. There is beauty in the darkness but so little! I finished it with a sense of hopelessness to heal from traumas that are horrendous in some cases but also very likely to occur in others like the death of a parent. Are we bound forever in fractured healing from the living of life? Is this not just one side of the coin - the other side being an endless joy in everything around us?
Obviously very well written if it’s made me so upset!

[Markel Tumlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike most books that call themselves novels, this one lacks the kind of narrative arc a reader often expects. It is instead an impressionistic work built around a number of vignettes and memories recounted by the unnamed narrator that occur throughout a variety of times and places to him and to some of those close to him. The unifying theme is found in the title, that of absence, often accompanied by loss and the resulting grief. At times a difficult book, but written in oftentimes poetic language, I enjoyed it but was also glad that it was as short as it was. Not sure I’d recommend it to everybody, but it would likely appeal to certain people who enjoy self-consciously literary works.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absence is a delicate meditation on memory and loss, where each story unfolds like an echo of other absences.

“The dead never leave you. They remain, strangely and beautifully, sometimes horrifyingly, always surfacing, again and again above time’s rising black water.”

“She, from then, would live in that strange position I have found so many of us having lived – pressed between a piercing howl and an irreversible silence.”

“It was an understanding that the knowable would forever remain unknowable and the sayable would forever remain pale, ghostlike, evasive.”

[Thandeka Mthimkhulu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved reading this book 👌🏽👌🏽at first I was worried thinking it was poetry ( I am not a particularly fond of poetry) but to my surprise it was a brilliantly written novel 👏🏽👏🏽his very first and goodness Issa Quincy is a great storyteller 🙌🏽🙌🏽definitely looking forward to more of his books ❤️❤️10/10

He manage to capture the absence of something in your life in such a profound way. As you read you relate to each encounter and experience what that absence means to the story. I am absolutely love it.

[Brooke Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for my creative writing class and i am blown away, this novel is poetically devastating and beautifully human.i am also blessed that i got to hear issa quincy speak about his novel and im blown away. What is our life and who will hear us. What do we share and what do we keep out? How does our loses affect our present and how do we move with our future? what do we do with the stories we experience and hear. our life is subjective and so is our experiences.

[Audrey]

This just didn’t click for me (it did click for some people at book club, so take this w a grain of salt). I had a hard time with the structure and it didn’t really feel like it coalesced to me. Also I didn’t really vibe with the prose; I thought it was overwrought at times. But then again, I think I move through the world in a very different way than the narrator of this book does, which is prob part of the disconnect.