The Third Window

The third window in Antonia Wellwood's house looks out onto the garden where her husband Malcolm is buried. She cannot bear to look through it, and she cannot bear to have it boarded up. This is the delicate territory Anne Douglas Sedgwick maps in her quietly devastating novel: the impossible space between holding on and letting go. Captain Saltonhall has loved Antonia for years, but Malcolm's ghost, his memory, his very presence, stands between them. The novel unfolds through their conversations, their silences, their tentative moves toward each other and their equally tentative retreats. Sedgwick was a friend of Henry James, and her prose shares his psychological precision: every line does double duty, revealing what her characters say and what they cannot say. This is a novel about the strangeness of surviving grief, about whether the heart can make room for new love without betraying the old. It moves at the pace of long glances and unfinished sentences. For readers who treasure literary fiction that anatomizes emotion with quiet ferocity, The Third Window is a small, perfect thing.