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The stories in Five Tuesdays in Winter find their characters--children, teenagers, young adults, parents--in singular moments in their lives, moments when their ways of thinking--and living--have been called into question, disrupted, shifted. All these moments hinge on the interpersonal, on a growing relationship or a severed one, or else on a relationship that a character must now renegotiate on different terms: a mother trying to connect with her daughter in the wake of her husband's death, a boy learning to see his life differently in the absence of his parents, a man reuniting with the college roommate he used to be infatuated with. To say that these moments are singular, though, is not to say that they entail some kind of monumental upheaval; they are small moments, but just because they are small does not mean that they register as any less important to the characters who experience them.

Fall, to me, screams "historical fiction," so I thought I'd do a recommendation post featuring some of my favourite historical fiction novels, as well as some on my TBR that I'm hoping to get to soon!! 🍂 In this list, I have novels set in England, Australia, France, Kuwait + Palestine, China, Uganda, and Guadalupe.

Trespasses is a book that, quite simply, does not fuck around. It's such a taut novel, vibrating with tension, and yet so controlled and precise in the way that it manages that tension. Its strength lies as much in what it says as what it doesn't; Kennedy knows when to give and when to withhold, and this makes for such striking, resonant narrative moments. (There's this small moment in the last chapter of the book that I haven't been able to stop thinking about; not gonna lie I get emotional every time I think about it.) A character will say or do something that seems significant--a line, a reaction, a gesture--and then the chapter will just end, or the scene will just move on. It's tantalizing, yes, but not needlessly so; that it withholds is as much a narrative choice as it is a product of the sociopolitical conditions of the setting that grounds that narrative. It's a novel that leaves spaces for the unsaid, and that is in fact what it is all about: tensions--sectarian, familial, romantic--that the characters have to navigate largely by way of the unsaid: through subtext, through intimation, through looks or gestures that speak for them when they can't speak for themselves, or else can't say what they want to.

"He wondered if time was a form of love, a way of doling out affection in reasonable pieces, in parts small enough that you weren't aware of their size, and of what was slowly disappearing from your own form as you gave them away."

So last month for #womenintranslationmonth, I read and ADORED Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. They were my first Ferrante books ever, and now I'm 100% going to be reading every single thing she's ever published. That being said, reading Ferrante has really made me want to delve more into translated Italian fiction, so I thought I'd do a lil recommendation post with some of the Italian novels in translation that I've found out about since and want to read soon!

Elif Batuman is one of my favourite authors ever; her writing is wry, sharp, and cerebral, and I just find her books to be so incredibly compelling. All of this is to say, the fact that I loved her latest novel, Either/Or--which is a sequel to The Idiot (I still can't believe we got a sequel!!!)--was pretty much an inevitability. It's such a fascinating exploration of so many things: of the novel and what it's supposed to do (if indeed it's supposed to do anything), of what kind of guiding principles can or should inform life (ethical? aesthetic?), of gender and relationships and literature and--I could go on. All of this maybe seems a little lofty for one book, but in Batuman's hands it all comes together beautifully (and the ending of this book is just !!!!!).

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