![]() It’s also as much a shape-changer as Shift, moving from genre to genre with dizzying grace. Its section titles echo Taryn’s concerns about the threats to libraries: Insects, Fire, Light, Damp, Carelessness and Uncaring. “The Absolute Book” is a threaded needle embroidering itself into being. It includes anecdotes about the Firestarter: a locked scroll box that is “said to have survived no fewer than five fires in famous libraries.” Several years later, Taryn is the successful author of a book called “The Feverish Library,” about the dangers faced by collections of books over centuries. Taryn Cornick was 19 when her sister, Beatrice, was murdered, and her rage and grief over that loss have shaped her life: her distance from her famous-actor father, her marriage to a wealthy older man, and her strange, brief intimacy with a Canadian wilderness guide she calls the Muleskinner. ![]() ![]() ![]() Between them they contrast the pleasures of surprise with those of satisfied expectations.Įlizabeth Knox’s THE ABSOLUTE BOOK (Viking, $28) contains multitudes, spanning the geographies of Canada, Britain and New Zealand the cosmologies of fairies, demons and angels and the genres of thriller, domestic realism and epic fantasy. Here are two novels that are, in some ways, opposites: one by an author who’s been publishing celebrated work for 40 years, and one a debut one that blends numerous genres with a skillful and inquiring hand, and one that glories in modeling a single genre by hitting every one of its notes. ![]()
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