Sublime

filled with the kind of determined cheer that masked a deeper despair.

precocious.

trenchant,

Her public reputation, like Demeter’s daughter, crawls back up from the underworld.

raconteur?

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

ornery.

inures

inchoate