Over the course of awkward cross-talk, social functions and life-threatening incidents, Kiem and Jainan fumble their way toward understanding and affection.

Kiem is aghast at the thought of marrying someone so recently bereaved Jainan is horrified by the prospect of failing his people by giving any pretext for the treaty to be broken. Kiem is a genial social butterfly Jainan is a quiet, reserved deep-space engineer. But I’m in awe of it, ultimately, its precision and care, and its wry, understated humor. Hasty resolutions and an odd departure of an epilogue somewhat unbalance the whole. But when I finished it, I was left wondering whether it had cohered it felt as if I’d been admiring all the cogs and gears animating a fine watch while uncertain about whether or not it kept time. Reading the book is like holding folds of shot silk to the light, finding green flash in something that looks purple, and appreciating how thoughtfully the warp and weft embrace each other.

I wish Grendel would burst into the hall and eat us.” Chapter 7 lands Taryn in a fairy otherworld. I read the first six chapters puzzled as to whether this was a fantasy novel at all, before an epigraph from Patricia Lockwood’s “Priestdaddy” announces the transformation: “It makes me long to see a different animal, from a different story. It’s also as much a shape-changer as Shift, moving from genre to genre with dizzying grace. Its section titles echo Taryn’s concerns about the threats to libraries: Insects, Fire, Light, Damp, Carelessness and Uncaring. “The Absolute Book” is a threaded needle embroidering itself into being. It includes anecdotes about the Firestarter: a locked scroll box that is “said to have survived no fewer than five fires in famous libraries.” Several years later, Taryn is the successful author of a book called “The Feverish Library,” about the dangers faced by collections of books over centuries. Taryn Cornick was 19 when her sister, Beatrice, was murdered, and her rage and grief over that loss have shaped her life: her distance from her famous-actor father, her marriage to a wealthy older man, and her strange, brief intimacy with a Canadian wilderness guide she calls the Muleskinner. Between them they contrast the pleasures of surprise with those of satisfied expectations.Įlizabeth Knox’s THE ABSOLUTE BOOK (Viking, $28) contains multitudes, spanning the geographies of Canada, Britain and New Zealand the cosmologies of fairies, demons and angels and the genres of thriller, domestic realism and epic fantasy. Here are two novels that are, in some ways, opposites: one by an author who’s been publishing celebrated work for 40 years, and one a debut one that blends numerous genres with a skillful and inquiring hand, and one that glories in modeling a single genre by hitting every one of its notes.

The absolute book by elizabeth knox