The Candy House: A Novel

Here was his father’s parting gift: a galaxy of human lives hurtling toward his curiosity. From a distance they faded into uniformity, but they were moving, each propelled by a singular force that was inexhaustible. The collective. He was feeling the collective without any machinery at all. And its stories, infinite and particular, would be his to

She struggles to believe that Piers is as real as she is—as full of thoughts and memories and feelings.

I’m itching to get to my medical clinic, where there’s always more to do and it always matters. But I’ve learned to resist that impulse.

“I still enjoy being alive, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. And then, in a phrase that haunted Chris, “But I’m tired of my history.”

But I hadn’t counted on the circularity of life: the way it delivers us, with age, back to the beginning.

I see now that the place I’ve been yearning for is my own imagination.

Alone by choice on Saturday nights, writing by an open window in his studio apartment, Gregory had experienced a kind of euphoria: a swelling, bursting, yearning hunger that had something in common with lust but included everyone, from the revelers outside his window to the carousers down the hall. He was where he wanted to be, and needed nothing e

The defector is a typical—likely an impressionist—beguiled by a fantasy of freedom and escape. It is a state of mind I can grasp only theoretically. There is nothing original about human behavior.

If she’d had an inkling, back then, of the ache this constraint would cause her, she would never—not once!—have said, “Let go of me, boys, I just need a minute,” and shaken them off. She would have held still and let them pick her clean, understanding that there would be nothing better to save herself for.