The Street Called Straight

In 1911 New York, Peter Davenant returns to the world that once rejected him. Years ago, Olivia Guion refused his proposal; now she's about to marry another man. At her dinner table, Davenant sits as a guest who is no longer quite a stranger but hardly a friend either, moving through familiar rooms where he once imagined a different life. Basil King renders with surgical precision the peculiar torture of watching the person you loved choose someone else, of being polite while your past hangs in the air like smoke. The novel traces what happens when a man must rebuild himself after losing the future he expected, and it asks whether dignity can survive the encounter. King, a Canadian clergyman who turned to fiction at fifty, understood that social rejection is not simply a moment but a wound that reshapes the self. For readers drawn to the psychological subtlety of Henry James or the social architecture of Edith Wharton, this is a quiet devastation: a story about what remains when pride meets memory.