Evelyn Drake, a thirty-something widow returning to New York after years in Europe, settles into a small furnished apartment in a brownstone - a comedown from the life she once knew, though exactly what that life entailed remains tantalizingly out of frame. From her windows she observes a courtyard of weather-worn stone ornaments and 'discouraged shrubs,' a tiny yard that suggests 'a cemetery of small things that had to have correspondingly small tombstones.' This is Bonner at her finest: wry, precise, melancholic without sentimentality. As Evelyn navigates her modest new existence, she encounters fellow tenants like Miss Harris, an aspiring singer, each character a small study in ambition and reinvention. The novel excels at what it doesn't say - the secrets behind Evelyn's return, the nature of her late marriage, the precise shape of her desires. It's a portrait of a woman learning to live again in a city that is both indifferent and full of possibility, written with the kind of quiet authority that makes the ordinary absolutely absorbing.
