To the East of the East
A husband gone to Macau under another man's name, explaining himself in letters that reach his wife too late.
Theme
Intimacy
Reviews examining emotional dependency, sexual negotiation and the long, difficult labour of attachment.
Reviews filed under this theme.
The Things We Never Say
A history teacher plans his death in private, undone by a disclosure that rewrites the marriage behind it.
How to Make a Woman
Two accounts of the same fifteen years, measuring what one woman inherits against what the other improvises across the road.
Black Bag
A failed actor paid to sit in a leather bag, drawing more notice hidden than his face ever earned.
Foster
A summer of care staged as rescue, ending in a child carrying a measure her own family need never meet.
Kingfisher
A debut novel follows a writer’s affair with an older woman, turning desire, illness and care into a question of who controls the record.
Arendal
One night failing to get home. Thirty years failing to get anywhere further.
Hot Fruit
Orphanage origins, family objects, meals and fables shape lives built around beginnings that cannot be securely known.
Handsome
A novel of marriage, memory and Alzheimer's narrated by a woman whose case against her husband survives her failing mind.
Box Hill
A six-year BDSM relationship written as a study of unequal access: a flat without a key, a man without a surname, a death without a grave.
The Land in Winter
During the winter of 1962–63, four people try to keep marriages, animals, patients and unborn children alive after the terms of their lives have begun to fail.
Country People
A warm, loose comedy of family, belief and Vermont eccentrics. Generously constructed, intermittently brilliant, and approximately one hundred pages too forgiving of itself.