Alone, he admits to being a poor little guy—isn’t everyone with any degree of self-knowledge an insignificant person?—but denies taking himself for a genius. What does it mean, anyway, to take oneself? Surely in such a case of false self-identification one should say mistake oneself. Ah, those lying words.

Mr. Foote has a talent for conjuring up such images. He has a graphic way of speaking, being from Newfoundland. He doesn’t tiptoe around. He’s built on a square plan: wide torso, thick legs, a short distance between ear and shoulder. It’s a balanced shape, with a low centre of gravity. Mr. Foote would not be easy to upend. Nell expects that’s been

The kettle is aluminum, of a type that has surely been outlawed. Just looking at it gives Nell cancer, but an unspoken rule says that it must never be discarded. The cover will fit only if placed just right: Nell marked the position years ago, with two circles of pink nail polish, one on the lid, a corresponding one on the kettle itself, which must

By that time, I’d finished university and left my mother’s house. My departure was not amicable: she was bossy, she was spying on me, she was treating me like a child! Those were my parting words. “Suit yourself, my pet,” she’d said. “When you need help, I’ll be here. Shall I donate your old stuffed animals to charity?” A pang shot through me.

We’re in the middle of a regime change, like the French Revvie. Power struggles! They were always changing the passwords. Wake up one morning, use yesterday’s password, off with your head.”

Satire in extreme times is risky. Choose any excess, think you’re wildly exaggerating, and it’s most likely to have been true. (Sympathetic murmur) I know.

Once, at supper, Tig paused, spoon half lifted, and looked out the window. “He sometimes let them go,” he said. Nell knew exactly who he meant, and what he meant. He meant Maigret. You can recognize whole songs, whole symphonies, from just a few notes, if you know the music well.

What is she doing, wandering around the house in the middle of the night, in the middle of this one condensed slice of past time in which so much is happening but so much is obscure? Pawing through the rubble, a brick here, a shard there, fragments of lives; trying to understand things that can’t be understood, or not by her. Pieces of paper,

The late 1960s was a time of big domestic breakups: the so-called sexual revolution, post-pill, pre-AIDS. Young bearded hippies everywhere, girls in maxicoats, then long flower-child skirts and granny boots, acid and weed freely available, plus—later—other substances. It was as if the 1950s ideal family had swelled up like a water balloon and then