Unseen City: A Novel

But today something is different, as if her interior mope has transformed into weather.

She can remember when she first came to the orphanage (in a spotty way—she remembers the orphanage seeming new and strange but can’t recall what life had been like before, or where, or with whom) that the land was even wilder back then, the stately plantation house seeming to rise from the dirt as if Miss Murray and the Miss Shotwells had grown it

She was a living, breathing missed connection.

“Meg, please.” Because if they were going to talk about this, they were going to have to be friends, and because Meg had a name that made people feel automatically friendly toward her, its cozy single syllable and indistinct old-fashionedness like invitations to intimacy.

like a scientist or a mathematician, or, she tried not to think, someone on the IT-end of the autism spectrum.

“I’ve been wondering if I’d run into you! I thought I remembered you worked here. Remy loves the storytime. We’re here all the time. We’ve even learned to come early enough to get a ticket. I’m a stay-at-home dad now, it’s pretty funny.”

The Central Library, home to six thousand books and one ghost—Agatha Cunningham, age six—was meant to itself approximate the shape of an open book—a neat architectural trick few of its patrons acknowledged as they waited grumpily for their turns on the public computers—with the atrium serving as its spine. At one end/page of the atrium was the entr

She knew that he himself lived in hoity-toity Park Slope, with all the rich white people and their SUV-strollers, and that this was his only rental property, and that he tried to do a good job—when he stopped by, he brought treats for her four-year-old, and spoke to him respectfully, as if he were indeed a tiny man—but she also knew that there was

a sticky summer evening, for example, as new renters attempted to settle into the sepulchral apartment downstairs—a young couple, arranging themselves in their first shared home, arguing over whose desk should go where in the office off the kitchen, which suddenly seemed drafty, didn’t it? Should they contact the landlord? Or? Tape the windows? Or?