The Road Home

I have turned my attention to Rose Tremain's The Road Home, a book that kept me reading much of the night, on the long, black couch where I am parked many a night. It's her precision that is so thrilling, not a single superfluous word and yet no scene that feels thin or meagerly adjoined to another.

Indeed, The Road Home is a seamless book, at least so far. Which makes it feel like a faultless book. Not flawless, perhaps there's that too. But faultless in that each of the characters is living what seems like a true life, nothing fancied up or muddied up for the sake of plot spark, plot sparkle. Authenticity is the sparkle here. That and these incredible scenes of, say, fishing at night in a lake whose dirtied waters have blued the fish, turned them neon colors.

The Road Home is a widower's story—a journey made from Eastern Europe to London. It is rocking this reader hard.