Annabel Lyon is one of the country's most electrifying new literary voices. Written in tough, crystalline prose, these stories explore our need by turns to connect with the people around us, to pull back, to reach out again. When a struggling businessman adds an Adults Only section to his video store, he inadvertently gives his put-upon sister-in-law another chance at happiness. A baffled father does his best to understand the anxiety that keeps his thirteen-year-old daughter awake at night. The facts surrounding a murder become a tangle of contradictions when three teenagers each tell their side of the story. A man's lifelong devotion to the girl abandoned to his care is not enough to save her from herself. As Lyon bravely delves into the gulf between what is said and what is left unsaid, she reveals to us the awkward and familiar gestures we use to fill our lives.
They are both lawyers, hence this business of the apples is unnecessary. But the way he slops food around, wine in the vegetables. His copper pans, hung and preening. He has taken an airplane to the opera.
"I have candles somewhere," she had said. Martin sat in her apartment. They had just met. Martin didn't like sitting on the floor, couldn't settle his knees, but she had no chairs apart from the piano bench, which was tucked under the piano. She had an air mattress and a sleeping bag. She was camping.
He could not comprehend such a sad manner of living. But he also had an old small feeling of safety, something of heat and soap, sleep and lunch. Perhaps it was the novelty of clean light on a first night.
