"To Reach Japan" begins with a departure and ends with an arrival. McClelland & Stewart - Random House, 2012 That is not commonly how it goes, but it's not unusual in the territory of Alice Munro's stories, which often begin in the present and work backwards to the
At first it seems simple. One scene after the next. Imagine them, jotted on yellowed, soiled, stained pages from eighty-someodd-years ago. Scattered across time and space, you quietly order each of these moments in your reader's mind. You think you are assembling a timeline, affording these scenes refuge
"Flo said to watch out for White Slavers." The opening line. There's Flo with her tales of abuse and mistreatment, with the litany of threats, near and far, posed to women and girls. She also warns Rose about the retired undertaker, with his also-retired hearse, about the the way that he
Tessa Hadley’s The London Train HarperCollins, 2011 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) It’s a little like Barbara Pym with trains, this second novel of Tessa Hadley’s: the characters, even those in relationships, feel decidedly solitary. (She has written three other works of fiction
