The End of Everything
Years of explanations for an unexplained invasion, thrown on a fire beneath a pier, then into the sea, leaving one page.
Theme
Memory
Fiction in which the past is testimony, reconstruction and selective archive. Reviews of how memory shapes narrative.
Reviews filed under this theme.
Three
A daughter returns to her hometown after years abroad and finds her ageing parents living a life she no longer shares.
There Is No Antimemetics Division
A war against creatures that eat memory, fought by people the world no longer remembers.
Paradise Burns
A young man dies at twenty-four, and the people who loved him each keep a different piece of his life.
The Renovation
A prison cell behind a bathroom wall serves an exile her country back, and it dissolves on the way out.
The Things We Never Say
A history teacher plans his death in private, undone by a disclosure that rewrites the marriage behind it.
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
Prison sentences spoken as university degrees, returning each political abstraction to the people required to live inside it.
Foster
A summer of care staged as rescue, ending in a child carrying a measure her own family need never meet.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
A house's debt to the devil staged as inheritance, ending in a granddaughter who lives outside its doctrine.
Arendal
One night failing to get home. Thirty years failing to get anywhere further.
Palimpsest
A memoir organises a life as social evidence, placing wit, rank and sexual candour under the pressure of what the argument cannot contain: the grief that outlasts every performance of detachment.
Handsome
A novel of marriage, memory and Alzheimer's narrated by a woman whose case against her husband survives her failing mind.