Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Set on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, this rich, intricate novel follows a young gay art-school graduate, Cal, who returns home when his devout father, John, a tenant farmer who raised him alone, intimates that his grandmother is ill. In Falabay, the largely Presbyterian village of his upbringing, Cal hides his sexuality; he remembers people looking at him, as a teen-ager, with “faint unease.” Stuart’s novel examines the threads that bind Cal and John together—blood, faith, tradition, grievance, violence, and more commonalities than they know. At the same time, it is a coming-of-age story, in which Cal must define the relationship between himself and his origins. “Do you even want all this?” his mother asks him, at one point. “To be home. To be here.”

Body Double, by Hanna Johansson, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson (Catapult). This eerie novel of obsession and transference alternates between two story lines. In one, two women move in together soon after they mix up their coats in a department-store café. One of the women, Laura, tells the roommate, Naomi, very little about herself, and appears to have no job or friends—indeed, no existence at all outside of the one the two women share. In the other story line, an unnamed woman who transcribes recordings for a ghostwriter hears an unnerving whisper on a tape: “I have seen you. Have you seen me?” Together, the story lines fuse into an exploration of feminine selfhood, as the characters grapple with what it is to know oneself and to be known by others.

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