First published 2002
Maria Poniatowski sits in her Canadian home, remembering the Germans who forced her into slave labor, the displacement that brought her across an ocean. She has given everything to her son Radek, watching him climb toward success that pulls him further from her world. She holds fragments of Ukraine in her memory but wonders what pieces of the past deserve saving and which ones might crush the present. In the second novella, an American academic rents a London flat for the summer to research a book about death. Below her live Ridley Wandor, a soft caretaker for dying elderly patients, her invisible mother, and a collection of rabbits Ridley calls "the hunters." The academic watches through windows and listens through walls as Ridley's patients slip away one by one. Loneliness sharpens the academic's focus on her downstairs neighbor until observation becomes fixation. Both stories ask whether imagination born from isolation destroys or creates, whether the mind's inventions can forge new realities from old wounds.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Canada, Ukraine, London
Period: 20th-century
191 pages · Paperback · Mariner Books
Content warnings: war