The Land in Winter, by Andrew Miller (Europa). This delicately written, deeply psychological novel, which was nominated for the Booker Prize, follows two neighboring married {couples} via a brutal English winter in 1962. The husbands, a health care provider and an underexperienced farmer, are sometimes befuddled by their countryside existences. The wives, each pregnant, have interaction in a weird friendship that serves because the e-book’s dramatic engine. Because the quartet’s secrets and techniques and longings come to mild, so, too, do traumas of the Second World Conflict and the stressed, uncomfortable dynamics of a contemporary age in transition. Miller’s prose is light and splendid, punctuated by hanging imagery: snowflakes on the tongue are “stone-flavoured, the information of the sky.” He delights in inside tensions, and within the wrenching interaction between his characters and their merciless environment.
Flop Period, by Lara Egger (Pittsburgh). “Are these emotions / fake fur or real leather-based?” asks one of many poems on this enchanting assortment, which reveals a eager attunement to the methods seduction can change into destruction, language can change into which means, and delusion can change into perception. Animated by an irreverent zaniness, Egger’s poetry fuses parts drawn from up to date idiom and from lyric custom to render a surreal world that interrogates existential questions on need and grief. “Honestly, / I’m an imposter, deathly afraid / of heights,” she writes. “One strategy to clarify sorrow / is to imagine / god by no means seems to be down.”
