The Hunters

by Claire Messud

Claire Messud's two exquisite short novellas, acclaimed for their subtlety, their insight and their dazzling prose, are destined to become masterpieces of twenty-first-century literature. Claire Messud's two brilliant novellas are exquisitely positioned: poised, subtle and perfect, they communicate with each other across expanses of silence like works of art. It is almost startling to encounter writing of this quality . . . This is masterly prose – modest, authentic, compassionate, interested and majestically complete . . . These two small masterpieces reflect and complement one another so as to form something larger, a work of tremendous scope and significance. I can think of few writers capable of such thrilling seriousness expressed with so lavish a gift’ Evening Standard ‘Messud proves to be as much an accomplished storyteller as an immaculate stylist . . . She is a mistress of parenthesis, the telling aside, the unspoken . . . With the short novel, Claire Messud, like Alice Munro, has found her ideal form’ Daily Telegraph Two short novels of remarkable power and artistry that outweigh works twice or thrice their size . . . They achieve their aim quite beautifully’ Financial Times ‘Messud is an expert storyteller. Her style is precise and illuminating, transforming the mundane into the unusual . . . dazzling’ Observer

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Novella, Novels, Literature, Ukraine

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Claire Messud is an American novelist and literature and creative writing professor. She is best known as the author of the novel The Emperor's Children (2006).

Reviews

[Gloria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claire Messud is incredible. I read this in one sitting because I just couldn't put it down. I don't mean it was super suspenseful, I just mean the writing, the characters were so interesting that I had to keep reading. I absolutely loved this and "The Woman Upstairs", liked "The Emperor's Children", now I'm going to read everything else she has written. It's a sin and a shame she's not a household name like, say, Donna Tartt, who's good, but in my opinion, Messud is much better.

[G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This duo of novellas should have been a much bigger deal than it was. From a craft perspective, they are dizzyingly accomplished. She slyly does not reveal the name or gender of the protagonist of the second book, but you don't notice until the very end, when it becomes significant, and you are left maddeningly to guess.

[Chris Waterford · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I read "A Simple Tale", I was quite disappointed. For me, it had no life. It was well written but seemed detached---ordinary. I was reluctant to start on "The Hunters" and was prepared to abandon it if it continued in the same vein, but lo and behold---the story was full of life and emotion and acute observation. How could this be? I reflected that it seemed like two different authors---and then I noticed a crucial difference in how the stories were told. The first story was written in the third person and the second was written by the narrator---much more personal. Two stars (5.5/10) for the first story and five stars (9/10) for The Hunters.
7.5/10

[Lorri Steinbacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a newly converted Messud fan. I loved these novellas. Although the stories couldn't be more different, they share a very similar emotional atmosphere: isolation and how we reconcile the part of us that "shows" to those parts of us that are hidden, and can we ever reconcile the two? In telling Maria's story, Messud writes that Maria saw parts of herself reflected in the different people that were in her life (son, employers, acquaintances) and she wasn't sure how all of those reflections could possibly reconciled into a whole. (Read the novella, Messud says it much more eloquently). Maria couldn't possibly reconcile herself. Her experiences in the camps schooled her in survival, but at a cost. In the next novella, the protagonist could not be more different than Maria. S/he is unspecified, we don't know his/her name, sex, can't even decode using the sex of the person's partner. S/he is suffering through a break-up, wants as little contact as possible with anyone, is angsty for no reason other than that's what educated, fairly well-off people do in crisis, struggle with the question of "who am i? is it worth it?" S/he struggles with a reconciliation of self, one much less weighty than Maria's, but a reconciliation all the same.

[Hutch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Claire Messud, and this book features two shorter novellas in one volume. The first story is the better of the two, following a Ukrainian woman through her life in a tiny village to the ravages of concentration camps in WWII, to her emigration to the US, and her life as a cleaning woman. As always, her writing is a gorgeous cluster of ripe words, falling into the pattern of her characters. The words and style of her writing shape the character as much as any events that befall her.

The second story, set in Kilbourne outside bustling London was harder to fall into, but is no less of an impressive piece of writing. Part of my experience was ruined by leaving the book at home when I went on a week-long trip; Messud's books are best devoured in a single sitting, or read in quick sessions close together. Leaving the story for a week ruined the flow of the writing.

Like all of her books, I'll read this one again and again.

[Jennifer (formerly Eccentric Muse)]

Impossible to provide one rating for these two novellas, as they are so different.

A Simple Tale - unrated
I honestly think I must've missed a huge chunk of this first novella. It ended so abruptly I could make no sense of what the trajectory of the story was. I listened to the last ten minutes at least four times.

The central section, detailing Maria's experiences as a Ukranian worker in a German labour camp during WWII, her escape, marriage, and emigration to Canada, was riveting.

But I have no idea where or how Maria's estrangement from her son or the death of her husband came to pass. And the bookending piece of Mrs. Ellington, Maria's employer, seemed lop-sided. Then, poof, the novella was over. Was there a piece missing from the audiobook? Did I fall asleep and miss a crucial bit? Disappointing, bizarre and I don't care enough to re-listen to figure it out.

The Hunters - 4/5
This was my favourite of the two. I love an unreliable, unlikeable narrator on a journey to self-insight. There was a deeply-explored theme here related to our perception of reality being shaped through the lens of our own self-perception (Anaïs Nin's “We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are”), and/or reality being created or manifested solely by our thinking it into being (in the Cartesian sense, if you want to be high-falutin', but also in the looser, woo-woo sense, law-of-attraction stuff).

But WTF with the bunnies? An almost surreal detail, but at least this one stuck the landing. I wish Messud had developed this into a proper novel; I would've liked the greater scope that a longer format could have provided - especially, more on the nameless narrator's life before London and the romantic break-up that preceded their time there; and life after (the personal transformation referred to due to the new love interest in their life -- queer? either the first or the second would have been a same-sex relationship; we are not told the narrator's gender).

Layered, intriguing, and suspenseful.

Consumed by audio; both read very well by their respective performers.

[John Stepper · Rating 4 out of 5]

What odd stories! And so different from each other! I’m not sure I liked or could even relate to any of the characters.

And yet. From the very first words I was drawn in by masterful writing. The styles (different in each story), the word choice, the phrasing and pace. Delicious.

This was my first book by Claire Messud, and I’m eager to read more.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

(review originally written for bookslut)

Ah, the strange predicament of the novella writer. They're seemingly too short to publish singly, yet how to group them into collections? Thematically? Chronologically? Randomly? Sometimes these groupings work, and sometimes they just don't. Claire Messud's The Hunters is one of those cases where it just doesn't.

The Hunters is comprised of two novellas, "A Simple Tale," and the title story. "A Simple Tale" is the story of Maria Poniatowski, a Ukrainian woman who moved to Canada after WWII, and became a housecleaner. Maria is widowed, partially estranged from her only son and his family, and seeing her pool of clientele shrink as the women she works for, mostly contacts made in the first few years after the war, gradually succumb to old age. It is the story of a woman in exile, who lives her entire adult life in a country that does not share her values nor her native tongue. Maria's character is sympathetic, and her story draws the reader in.

After the simple delight of "A Simple Tale," "The Hunters" was a big disappointment. "A Simple Tale" I read hungrily, but after wading about ten pages in to "The Hunters," I put the book down and could not bring myself to pick it up again for over a month. When I finally came back to it, I found the story to get slightly more engaging, but it still paled in comparison to the first novella.

"The Hunters" was off-putting from the start, as the narrator (whose gender is not revealed) spends pages obsessing over the change in the millennium. Here I suppose the fault could be in myself, the reader, for I could not separate my enjoyment of the book from my utter boredom with the theme of changing millennia. The hype over the new millennium was so overplayed that I was bored with it before the date ever changed, now two (or three, depending on how you count) years later, I find the topic still bores me. I hoped that once we were past this bump, we could settle down and I could find some other means of identifying with the narrator, but this hope was never realized.

It started, I suppose, with the mystery of the narrator's gender (which I did actually not realize until half-way through the novella, early on I had read the feminine into some pronoun or other and had assumed the narrator was a woman from that point forward). It was not half so cleverly done as Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body and worse, there seemed to be no point to it.

The narrator is an academic on sabbatical who has rented a flat in a run-down area of London. During the day s/he goes to the libraries to research attitudes on death through time, and during the day s/he returns to the flat, to sit in the dark and spy on the neighbors across the way, or develop obsessive fantastical theories about his/her downstairs neighbors, a woman and her mother, the woman being the only person who regularly intrudes into the narrator's anonymous existence. The narrator never gets involved in anything. Not in research, it seems, for we never hear of it. Not in the lives of the neighbors, as s/he avoids contact with them as much as possible, and tries to cut short what contact does occur. The narrator merely remains a passive observer throughout the story, so it seems difficult for the reader to get involved as well.

I am sure that "The Hunters" would not have been half as disappointing had it not occurred in the shadow of "A Simple Tale." As it is, however, I am very sorry that the two novellas were not published separately. I am sorry that after enjoying "A Simple Tale," I had to trudge through "The Hunters" before I could write a review. I am sorry that if I recommend The Hunters to anyone, they will have to pick up both stories together. And mostly I am sorry that it was not one of Messud's novels, When the World Was Steady, or The Last Life that I happened upon after "A Simple Tale." If one could judge reliably by Messud's online fans, either would have converted me to permanent adoration of her writing, and I could have easily overlooked the shortcomings of "The Hunters."

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a 2 for 1 as the book contains 2 novellas. The first is called A Simple Tale and it is essentially. The trauma of it (WWII camp) is distanced by the matter-of-fact narration and the protagonist's work ethic and lack of instrospection. As a young girl, Maria Poniatowski is OST, "taken" from the Ukraine to a Nazi work camp for the duration of the war. She is then a DP living in a refugee camp until she is repatriated in Canada with the Polish husband (Lev) she met in the camp and the baby they conceived. Now she is an immigrant and she and her husband find work, move forward and leave the past behind. She becomes a cleaning lady and her relationship with her clients, especially Mrs. Ellington forms the majority of the story. How the two old women strive to live in the present and form a friendship that transcends class is part of it, as well as the dashed dreams for Maria's only son Rod who should have thrived in a new place given all the advantages of a stable family and country. Maria is clearly a heroine, though vastly understated and underappreciated and her story in all its different parts, "like the fragments of a broken mirror" form a whole that reminds us of the underlying tales of the "least, the last, and the lost."
The second story, the Hunters is well-written but wordy. Understated pyschological drama - mostly interior - for the narrator who is taking a summer sabbatical in London to research her book about death. She has just left a relationship, about which we get no information, but it has taken a toll, as does her subject matter and her abject alone-ness. She gets a flat in a borderline part of town and loves the space itself with its feeling that "someone was happy here" but that soon becomes tainted by the narrator's imagination and her acquaintance with the downstairs neighbor, Ridely Wandor. She is an unattractive woman of indeterminate age who is a carer for the elderly by profession and for her own mother in particular. The title refers rather obliquely to the rabbits the Wandors keep which are their own symbol to decipher. Ridley confides to the narrator that her elderly patients keep dying on her in short order. The narrator, in her own fragile mental state begins to conjure this info into all sorts of scenarios in her mind, none of them seemly. "...I slowed, hibernant, in isolation, and my morbid imagination turned the cememtary soil like any professional gravedigger." p. 144 Ridley is rather needy, so on the few occasions the two meet, the narrator is elevated to "good friend" status, though doesn't share that opinion. The narrator returns to the US when summer ends and moves on with her life in a triumphant fashion comparing this trip to a chrysalis from which she emerges a different person. She doesn't give Ridley another thought until she returns to London with her new lover a year later and comes to know the truth of her story which is way off the mark from her imagination. A cautionary tale about judging by appearance, isolating, and living in your own mind.

[Maya Lang · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely duo of novellas, both involving isolated characters who find themselves removed from life around them. The first, "A Simple Life," was moving and elegiac, the story of a Ukranian immigrant who survived the German work camps and struggles to find a life for herself in Canada. It is told with compassion and an exceptional eye for detail, the prose like a perfectly ironed shirt. It would be a wonderful novella to teach.

The second of the pair, "The Hunters," was more provocative, but I found the prose distracting. Messud loves to cleave her sentences into three-part clauses: "At one time not so very long ago, for reasons that would not be worth explaining, I found myself temporarily installed in a flat on the outer reaches of London's Maida Vale." This is the opening line of the novella, and its rhythm keeps repeating. Frankly, it drove me insane, all of those interjected phrases offset by commas: "I was, needless to say, on my own"; "I was, officially, to have had a companion"; "But this, although it has its reasons, is not my focus." The narrator is an academic, it must be noted, but still. (Do you see what I did there?) I normally love Messud's sentences, but they weren't as crisp or purposeful here. This is unfortunate, because the subject matter of "The Hunters" is rich and fertile terrain.

[Kristen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've read and loved Messud before and I certainly don't remember all the maddening, writerly affectations that I found in this book: In every sentence, she'd capture my interest, then take off, inserting new clauses between everything.

This little book contained two novellas. The first was the story of a woman who escaped WWII and lived out her remaining years in Toronto. In the second, a New England professor (man or woman? Messud never tells us) stays in London for a summer, his/her peace disturbed by a pesky neighbor. The New York Times called it "Exceptional, a work of near-miraculous perfection." I call it "Huh?" Baffling, inconclusive, no pay-off.

My dear Claire M., I liked you so much in The Emperor's Children. What gives?

[Bennett Windheim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have given this a 3.75 if I could. The author has an impressive ability to deliver two stories in completely different tones and voices and perspectives. There are overlapping themes of death and loneliness. The first story, A Simple Tale,” is immediately compelling, while the second, “The Hunters,” takes awhile to warm to as the writing style is so cursive as to be at times unreadable. Over time, we accept this as the affectation of the narrator, and the story becomes more complex and interesting. The author has tremendous control of the language, and particularly in the first story the precision of her vocabulary and confidence of style are at their most compelling.

[Kate Bullard Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you love Henry James -- and mentally diagramming sentences -- as much as I do, you'll be enraptured by these two novellas by Claire Messud. When was the last time I saw 'perforce' in print? Probably when I read The Ambassadors a few years ago. Messud not only assumes an intelligent reader, she awakens your own inner intelligent reader; if you're like me, she/he/they may have gotten a little lazy in recent years. The meticulous precision of her prose commands attention, a shot of adrenaline to the brain. You'll find yourself sitting up a little straighter as you read, and, when you're finished, feeling the loneliness and pain of others -- and maybe yourself? -- a lot more.

[Mary Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read A Simple Tale, the first novel in the book. It's like a fairly routine sad story. Maria, our main character, lived as a persecuted Pole during her teenage years in World War II, and then emigrated with her husband to Canada. Maria coped with her sufferings and deprivations. She had some happy times, but most of the story is a "simple" tale of her survival.

I didn't grow bored with this story, but, as the title suggests, there's not too much to the tale.

[Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the first novella, "A Simple Tale," very much but couldn't really get into the second one (for which the volume is named). That said, I finished the whole thing in a couple hours on a plane so certainly didn't dislike it.

[Renata · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was OK. I actually don't like her writing style here. Seemed like she was practicing all the tricks they teach you in creative writing classes.

[Starre Vartan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Hunters," one of two novellas in this edition, is now officially one of my favorite short stories of all time. Absolutely chilling. It gets five stars on its own.

[Juanita Rice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feb 03, 2009
This 2001 book contains 2 Novellas, "A Simple Tale" and "The Hunters." It was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award and is Messud's third book after When the World Was Steady and The Last Life.

The NYTimesreview called it "a work of near-miraculous perfection," but a week after reading it, I recall very little of it. "A Simple Tale" traces the life of a Ukrainian woman from her capture by the German army as a teenager, her survival of Krupp's labor camps, marriage and emigration to Canada, and then her disappointment in her only son's "bad marriage." Through most of her adult life she comes in as domestic maid for families that eventually die out until she only has one left, a Tuesday at the home of Mrs. Ellington where she has worked for 46 years when the story actively begins.

The closing event of the narration, a purchase of a brightly colored painting, and the catharsis it seems to represent failed to follow or "signify" to me. What is simple about "A Simple Tale"? Perhaps the author means to refer to the socially insignificant status of Maria--peasant, labor-camp slave, wife and mother, cleaning woman. Her writing is not simple in syntax, certainly; see below for a sample in the story. It is not simple in lacking dramatic incidents, although they mostly left me curious, not involved emotionally.

Of "The Hunters," I recall little but irritation. The language is more intricate than the first story but without charm. Again, my curiosity was awakened but not my empathy. Despite myself, I was hooked on the author's elaborate concealment of the fictional narrator's gender. I believed I deduced it, but I disliked all the characters, and felt neither surprise nor satisfaction nor sorry when the overly foreshadowed "tragedy" was revealed.

The fussy complexity of syntax was just one more stylistic "delay" of revelation: "But in that summer so far from all that was familiar to me, in which I barely believed in my own flesh, which I could bite or pinch or draw blood from, in that summer of strange enclosedness, in which the vast panes of glass in my flat, through which I could observe so much about which I felt so little seemed to travel with me outside into the city, like an invisible protective pope-mobile, I viewed the entire world at a muffled remove, without emotion."

My sentiments exactly.

PS: Curiously, although I was miffed at the way the writing obstructed my easy passage only to end in non-revelation, I find that these stories which I thought failed to make an impression, are deeply recalled after 8 years. !!??

[Rene Saller · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I really loved the first novella and felt genuinely sorry when it was over; in fewer than 100 pages, Messud really made me care about those people. But the title novella was a lot harder to embrace, and that decision felt strategic on Messud's part. She created an almost Nabokovian antihero, and because the story is first-person singular, we are limited to this person's POV. Almost maddeningly, we never learn our narrator's name, or even their gender or sexual orientation (although we do know that s/he is fairly flexible on that front, insofar as the "beloved" is described as a different gender than the narrator's previous partner). At any rate, the novella is about how we interpret and even create our own realities, so Messud's daring decision to make her narrator purely a creation of words, or "story," seems consistent with that thought experiment. The narrator does project a lot of personality, with his/her unwieldy but grammatical sentences--fusty, constipated, Jamesian--but it's hard to reconcile the vivid (and consistently unkind) descriptions of other people with the amorphous identity of the nameless, genderless first-person narrator. This is definitely a book that I'm glad I read on paper rather than took in by audiobook because I think I might have gotten lost in all those subordinate clauses.

[Arti · Rating 5 out of 5]

These two novellas are surprisingly good. The first 'A Simple Tale,' on the surface is a Canadian immigrant story, how people came to Canada after the second World War to make a home for themselves and their next generation. However, it speaks to deeper truths about personhood, home, hope, love and alas, relational conflicts and disappointments. Maria Poniatowski came from the Ukraine. Having lost her own family and close friends, arrived alone to find a new life in Canada. Met Lev in the "Displaced Persons" camp, fell in love, and started a family. Sounds common enough? But not in Messud's exquisite prose. Read my full review on Ripple Effects... especially the excerpts.

The second novella The Hunters is such a unique creation in several aspects... prose, suspense, characterization, and psychological exploration. Makes me think of many contemporary, popular fiction featuring an unreliable narrator. Considering the first publication date of 'The Hunters' being in 2001, all those popular fiction that came after need to use Messud's The Hunter as an exemplar of psychological, suspense writing with insights. She not only casts suspense, but taps deep into the psyche of the narrator in her perception of others, and ultimately, the realization of truth, then comes guilt.

While I discover these two novellas quite late, after so many years after their publication, I'm grateful that at least I've got the chance to savour them now, their relevance has remained timely. Something I'll reread again.

[S Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Candidly, I don't want to give this book four stars, but the writing has stuck with me. It's certainly better than a three-star read. The pair of novellas was a selection for our book club and it drove a rich dialogue. My final take is that the young author set for herself a few “modernity” tests and she has to have been pleased with the result.

In the title novella, she proves she can nail the unreliable (stream of consciousness) narrator. Part of my “downgrade” is due to my own heightened awareness of the motif, but she does the device great justice.

Also, the title (and our own reading) invokes irony, another measure of the modern criteria she may have set for herself.

None of the characters is particularly likable, either. Another modern trope perhaps.
And .... another horrifying journey through the human cruelties of WWII camps.

At least the novellas are short. So I ask you to forgive the cataloguing of my reservations and give this a read - especially if you like watching an author hone her talents and skills. Ms. Messud is clearly an accomplished novelist.

[Jennifer Trimble · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a book of two novellas. The first novella was A Simple Tale, about a Ukrainian widow that immigrated to Canada after WWII. The second novella was The Hunters was about an American woman spending a summer in Kilburn, England. The first novella was interesting because it went through the main character's (Maria) life; her difficulties with her clients as a cleaning lady and unhappiness with her daughter in law. The second second novella was slower in the beginning but I ended up enjoying the main character's (unnamed this time) observations about her neighbor. That character had gone to England to write a book and probably assumed that her neighbors would be standoffish because that is a stereotype of the British people. Her neighbor, Ridley, ended up being friendly but the main character found her intrusive.

Both novellas were well written. I liked both stories because the characters seemed like ordinary people that you might run into in daily life and wonder what their lives were like.

[Nancyliz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning. Two distinct stories about people we don’t know before, but do now. I loved the first story about a woman whose life was upended as a teen at the hands of the Germans in WWII. She suffered hard labor, freezing temperatures, starvation, deprivation, and the loss of her family. She survived. She met and married another survivor and they had a child who didn’t know what had come before him. I don’t know why, but it seems that they didn’t fill him in with the details. This is not new. The son knew they were DPs, Displaced Persons, who became Canadian citizens, but he grew away from them and took up with the daughter of a German woman, which destroyed his mom. She was critical, but we don’t know if she ever explained why the girl repulsed her. Oh, it’s a sad tale. Maria is the protagonist and her only confidants are her clients, for whom she cleans. It makes me sad, thinking about it, but without spoiling anything with details, let me say that it is never too late to see life from a different point of view, and that it is liberating.
The second story is odd.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first Messud-but not my last. These two novellas are exquisitely written—one concerning a Ukrainian-Canadian woman named Marie; the other concerning a visiting academic in London—and her very strange downstairs neighbor.

Marie is presented first as a weekly cleaning woman in Toronto—but her life contains multitudes, from girlhood in A hamlet, much of WWII in a German work camp; a daring escape; a displaced person’s camp; love; emigration; service; a son, a life.

“The Hunters” is another portrayal of dislocation—with a riddle running through it. Although the ending is not all wrapped up in a bow, it’s an intriguing, twisty journey.

[Andrew Barnes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actually two novellas which I was surprised about!

The first one, A Simple Tale, was okay, it followed a story of a woman's immigration tale through World War Two and her use as a political prisoner through her formative years. While it started out exciting (an incident with the woman she is caring for) it was extremely anticlimactic and disappointing.

The second, The Hunters, is again, anticlimactic, without any answers!!! I was so frustrated through out as it's written really intellectually and it made it hard to follow and then there was just no pay off.

[cynthia Byrne · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are two stories here, both quiet and sad. “A Simple Tale” is about a Ukrainian woman who emigrates to Canada with her husband and works as a housekeeper. She makes a connection with a very old lady, who is irascible and strange and who finally dies. The second story “The Hunters” is about a female professor who rents an apartment near London in a sort of seedy neighborhood and acquires a strange relationship with an odd woman who lives downstairs with a bunch of rabbits and her mother, who is never seen. An odd tale which has an uncertain ending.

[MÉYO · Rating 5 out of 5]

The audiobook was so nice I had to listen to it twice! The voice acting with the varying accents made this audiobook stand out, and i was simply blown away by the precision, the wittiness and the mastery of Messud’s writing. Upon my second go-around, I was able to pick up on even more intricate details that I missed the first time, and I still found myself bursting out laughing. In truth this is a 4.5 star book but 4 stars is just too low for this quality of writing.

[safina · Rating 3 out of 5]

im def not the target audience, my mom gave me this on a trip and the first one was so well written I fell in love with it. the ending was so concise (which I never see happen in short stories) and I thought it was so sad but such a good story. (the fact she didn't even know her husbands story hurttttt!!) (4/5)


the second book was so boring and bad and full of run on sentences (1/5)

[Foster Foster · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the early aughts, when this book was out in paperback, someone thought this was a good book for ninth graders and our whole class read it. I think I enjoyed the novellas far more than Messud enjoyed visiting our classroom to talk about them but should probably give them a reread to be more sure. Five stars for the memory.

[Lynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best novellas I’ve read in quite a while. The writing is amazing. “A Simple Tale” is more straight forward in style. “The Hunters” leaves the reader guessing. Not much is known about the narrator and the subtle suspense keeps one reading to the end.