by Paula Fox
First published 2020
Sophie Bentwood lives comfortably in a renovated Brooklyn home with her husband Otto. They are a childless middle-aged couple surrounded by cultural refinements and fashionable friends in a neighborhood just beginning to gentrify. One evening Sophie feeds a stray cat that bites her hand. This minor incident triggers a cascade of small tragedies and encounters that expose the fractured landscape of Sophie's inner world. Convinced she might have contracted rabies, Sophie sees everything through feverish eyes and growing unease. Her fear of disease blends with another kind of rage, an internal burning fueled by broken dreams and exhaustion with a meaningless existence. Sophie realizes that beneath the shell of ordinary life and its imperfect agreements, anarchy lurks. The book explores this rupture, this buried anguish that lies under the pristine surface of Otto and Sophie's privileged but empty conventional routine.
Genres: american-fiction, 20th-century, adult-fiction, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: character-study, fractured-reality, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Brooklyn
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
204 pages · Paperback · Sexto Piso
Content warnings: anxiety, depression, mental-illness