Gillian Linden

A gem of a debut novel about a young mother navigating the instabilities of teaching, parenting, and marriage in the wake of the pandemic. With deadpan humor and a keen eye for the strangeness of our days, Negative Space follows a week in the life of a part-time high school English teacher. At home, her two children, increasingly restless in the wake of the pandemic, ask constant questions that flit from the weirdness of television shows to casual conversations about mortality. Her husband, always on business calls with Hong Kong at odd hours, shows up for meals only occasionally. At school, her students seem increasingly disconnected, and some put worrying details of their lives into their creative writing assignments. And then there’s the possibly inappropriate interaction she thinks she saw between her boss and a student. . . . Filled with sly observations about our off-kilter days, Negative Space is a witty and resonant novel about the challenges of motherhood, the question of what we owe the people around us, and the search for normalcy in a fractured world.