Suspend Your Disbelief

Author Archive

Reviews |

Cheating at Canasta, by William Trevor

William Trevor is a God anyone can believe in–ever-loving and omniscient, but not omnipotent. Even as he reveals lives destroyed or halted, one is calmed by his authority, safe in his hands. It’s true; there is nothing he can do to save his characters from themselves. But in his latest collection, Trevor does not just bear silent witness: unlike most contemporary short-story writers, he spells out his stories’ moral lessons, traces them to their furthest conclusions, and even ties up loose ends.


Reviews |

The Outcast, by Sadie Jones

Sadie Jones’s exciting debut is saturated in the same high color as the embracing couple on its cover. Simultaneously tender and urgent, claustrophobic and wistful, The Outcast tells the story of Lewis Aldridge, a tortured romantic figure in the Heathcliff tradition, and of the repressive postwar English society that drives him to self-destruction.