Set against a background of mass extinction, grief is on every page, whether in the fore- or background. There’s no addition without subtraction, one of her characters admonishes, a theory Leichter tests in various incarnations throughout the novel. As the story progresses, Leichter takes us forward and backward in time as we see that the terrace has opened up a rift between worlds and that this magical space comes at a tremendous cost, both for Annie and Edward and for the physical world. Now, standing on the terrace, she woke to find her forgotten wound healed.”Īnnie and Edward are delighted with this new discovery-it’s every city-dweller’s dream!-but gradually come to realize that the terrace only appears when Stephanie is around. “She had been accommodating some unknown injury for years. For Annie, the terrace is a psychic reprieve, a reunion with her better self. But the terrace isn’t just an extra amount of square footage. But when Annie invites her coworker Stephanie over for dinner, a beautiful terrace suddenly appears inside a linen closet. As in Temporary, Leichter cuts right to a conflict at the heart of our present moment, in this case, a paucity of affordable housing and the indignity of never being able to get ahead. Windows are introverted, clasped, and huddled. The apartment is not only small it’s anthropomorphized. Terrace Story begins with a young couple: Annie and Edward, and their daughter, Rose, all squeezed into a too-small apartment with no hope of being able to afford something better. Her follow-up novel, Terrace Story (Ecco Press, 2023), takes a similarly slant approach to the ideas of home, belonging, and finding space for oneself in a crowded and disintegrating world. Hilary Leichter’s debut novel, Temporary (Coffee House Press, 2020), was a surreal examination of the very real ways that work and, more specifically, lack of meaningful work can pervert our sense of who we are and what our place is in the world.
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