Bookshelf — Leah Worthy

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With less plot than First Love and even more emotional punch, My Phantoms proves how impactful an exploration of one relationship can be. The novel focuses on a mother and daughter, Bridget and Helen. Everything else in their lives fades to the backg

Gwendoline Riley’s prose is straightforward and clean, poetic without needing to be lyrical. When it’s described as “deceptively simple,” it’s because it’s always taking you to a place of emotional resonance, and s

Set in 1950s New Orleans, The House on Coliseum Street is centered around unforgettable, 20-year-old Joan Mitchell. Her sparkling personality and humor reminded me of The Dud Avocado’s Sally Jay Gorce, and her despair, which deepens throughout

In her new story collection, Ayşegül Savaş returns to familiar themes, exploring them with her signature elegance and remarkable ability to combine subtlety with power.

Savaş’s characters often experience displacement, feeling estranged

I came to The Robber Bridegroom not knowing what to expect, only that I love Eudora Welty’s short stories, and this was her first novella. I didn’t even read the jacket copy before diving in. So, I was quickly surprised by the way its sto

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle is told through the journal entries of a seventeen-year-old girl living in the 1930s with her family in a rundown castle in the English countryside. Cassandra Mortmain is, as another character puts it, both ol

In her final semester at Wilder College, Isabel Rosen has an affair with her married professor that comes on the heels of an unwanted sexual encounter with someone she considered a friend. For a time, Isabel believes her professor listens to her in a

Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor renders with equal vividness the depths of maternal love and maternal anguish.

Soldier narrates to her young son, Sailor, the story of their early days together, and she holds little back, telling him about the

During a time when she was lost in grief, Ruth relied on her young daughter, Eleanor, in ways she never meant to. They grew apart. Eleanor left home at fifteen and developed a drug addiction that left Ruth in a permanent state of longing and worry. W

Helen Garner can write a sentence that makes you sit back and marvel, but the best thing about The Children’s Bach is its lack of density. It’s hard to say how she pulls it off, but what she gives you is like a loosely woven net through w

In The Orange Room, Rosie Price exposes hard-to-name and subtle abuses for what they are, the kind that are confusing for those who experience them and dangerously easy to dismiss. Harder to dismiss is their impact on a life, which is never subtle or

Reading Intermezzo, I often wondered what makes it so mysteriously compelling. After all, there’s an everydayness to the dramatic questions—Will Peter choose between Sylvia and Naomi? Will Ivan and Margaret build a lasting partnership des

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