Briefly Noted Book Reviews

"This delicately written, deeply psychological novel, which was nominated for the Booker Prize, follows two neighboring married couples through a brutal English winter in 1962. The husbands, a doctor and an underexperienced farmer, are often befuddled by their countryside existences. The wives, both pregnant, engage in a bizarre friendship that serves as the book's dramatic engine. As the quartet's secrets and longings come to light, so, too, do traumas of the Second World War and the restless, uncomfortable dynamics of a modern age in transition."

""Are these feelings / faux fur or genuine leather?" asks one of the poems in this enchanting collection, which exhibits a keen attunement to the ways seduction can become destruction, language can become meaning, and delusion can become belief. Animated by an irreverent zaniness, Egger's poetry fuses elements drawn from contemporary idiom and from lyric tradition to render a surreal world that interrogates existential questions about desire and grief."

Two neighboring married couples endure a brutal English winter in 1962, revealing secrets, wartime trauma, and tensions between tradition and modernity. The husbands struggle with rural roles while pregnant wives form a fraught friendship that drives domestic drama. Prose favors gentle, luxurious language and striking imagery, emphasizing interior tension and the harsh landscape. A separate poetry collection blends contemporary idiom with lyric tradition, using irreverent zaniness to examine desire, seduction, delusion, grief, and language's capacity to create meaning and belief. Imagery includes snowflakes likened to stone-flavoured sky tips, and poems that confess imposture, fear of heights, and speculative metaphysics about sorrow and divinity.

Read at The New Yorker