Unseen City: A Novel

It wasn’t anything as material as a rush of cold air. It wasn’t a sound or anything shifting unexpectedly or a window shutting or a rush of wind. It wasn’t a vapor. It wasn’t a shape. It wasn’t the sound of Kate’s voice warped by alternate dimensions. It wasn’t a smell—though how welcome that would have been, a whiff of not just her unscented-but-s

So she was happy—or content, that was grown-up for “happy,” wasn’t it?—to spend her days there, usually alone, often in silence.

People would pay anything in New York, even in Meg’s corner of what she called Prospect Heights but that the couple who had bought the two-bedroom downstairs—the white horsemen of the apocalypse, as Meg thought of them—called “North North Park Slope” (“No-No-Slo,” she mocked them to James over brunch). Particularly since Meg’s apartment, though sma

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

My tenacious agent, Julie Stevenson; wise editor, Kate Gale; and all the good people at Red Hen Press, for believing in this book.

OF COURSE, Meg’s wasn’t the only haunted house in the city that never rests. There was a house I once knew well, on Holland Avenue. If you could wrench off the front and peer in at the resulting dollhouse, you would see the stacked stories.

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?

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.