First published 2002
Sumire wants to be a writer. She wears an enormous secondhand coat and heavy boots and stays up too late reading Kerouac. Then she meets Miu, a polished, successful woman seventeen years older than her, and everything reorganizes itself around that feeling. Sumire cannot stop thinking about Miu. She calls her closest friend, K, at all hours, turning over the same questions: what is desire, exactly, and is it worth saying out loud? K listens. He always listens. He is also in love with Sumire and says nothing about it. Miu brings Sumire into her business, and the two women grow closer. Then a call comes from a small Greek island. Miu is on the line, her voice stripped bare. Sumire has disappeared. No note, no explanation, no trace. K flies out to find her. What he uncovers instead is a story Miu has never told anyone, something that happened years before on a Ferris wheel in a Swiss town, something that split her life in two. The search for Sumire becomes a search for what connects people who can never fully reach each other.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, contemporary, contemporary-romance
Vibes: atmospheric, emotionally-complex, introspective, lyrical, melancholic
Tropes: found-family, love-triangle, mystery-box, unrequited-love
Setting: Greece, Switzerland
Period: Contemporary
229 pages · Paperback · Vintage