Sufferance (Guernica World Editions, 76)
Charles Palliser
From the author of the international bestseller The Quincunx When his nation is invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy, a man persuades his wife that they should give temporary shelter to a young girl who is at school with their daughter. He has no idea that the girl belongs to a community against whom the invader intends to commit genocide. Days stretch into weeks and then months while the enemy's pitiless hatred of the girl's community puts all of the family in danger. Nobody outside the family can be trusted with the dangerous secret and the threat from outside creates internal conflicts that put the family's unity at risk.
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
The details don't matter - they're recognizable enough, after all. An unnamed man recounts the tale of an unspecified war and oppressive regime, and of the girl he and his family try to hide from the Enemy - and all the unraveling effects of that, and each subsequent, decision. It's a stifling, brutal, tightly-packed story that unfolds slowly but ruthlessly, the tension mounting with a sense of claustrophobic inevitability, spiraling toward a gut punch of an ending. I've long been a fan of Charles Palliser's work, and Sufferance is admittedly very little like his earlier books - but it shares with them Palliser's gift for making every word matter, crafting prose that can sidle under your skin and slip a knife between your ribs.
Thank you to the publisher for the advance review copy.
0
© 2024 Pagebound