Terrace Story
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the acclaimed novel Temporary, an intimate exploration of time, a fable about love, an epic daydream for a broken-hearted world
Annie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn’t there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller’s dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world.
Terrace Story follows the characters who suffer these repercussions and reverberations: the little family of three, their future now deeply uncertain, and those who orbit their fragile universe. The distance and love between these characters expands limitlessly, across generations. How far can the mind travel when it’s looking for something that is gone? Where do we put our loneliness, longing, and desire? What do we do with the emotions that seem to stretch beyond the body, beyond the boundaries of life and death?
Based on the National Magazine Award–winning story, Hilary Leichter’s profound second novel asks how we nurture love when death looms over every moment. From one of our most innovative and daring writers, Terrace Story is an astounding meditation on loss, a reverie about extinction, and a map for where to go next.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The delightful sophomore effort from Leichter (Temporary) expands on her National Magazine Award–winning story about a magic closet by adding multiple timelines that stretch into the future. When Annie, Edward, and their baby daughter, Rose, are visited by their friend Stephanie in their cramped new apartment, having been forced to move by a rent hike, Stephanie reveals a sprawling terrace behind their closet door, which wasn't there before. Leichter then switches to the story of George and Lydia, another married couple with a small child, and describes the couple's unhappiness in novel terms ("They argued about why they were arguing, until every argument collapsed on itself and fit precariously in the bad kitchen cabinet where the miscellany of their marriage languished in obscurity"). In another timeline, Rose, who comes of age in a future on the brink of human extinction, lives on a space station described as a "suburb," and longs for a lover who's left on a mission to another suburb. Connecting these threads is Stephanie's act of manifesting Annie and Edward's terrace and the reverberations it causes, the details of which Leichter gradually teases out, setting the stage for a deeply satisfying ending. Along the way, there are plenty of wry observations on time and memory ("Then again—most beginnings, apocryphal. Almost always unobserved. Who can remember with any accuracy life's initial drift toward its final shape?"). Leichter soars with this cogent yet dreamlike tale.
