Explore Booksellers suggests stories from obsessive love to Earth orbit

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Explore Booksellers in Aspen recommends a book about obsessive love, a short story collection and a tale of astronauts in orbit.

---

From the publisher: A novel about obsessive love and madness set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy’s eerily beautiful novel begins innocently enough: “At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.” But there is nothing innocent here. With the off-handed remorselessness of a young Eve, the narrator describes her potentially lethal designs to win the affections of Fréderique, the apparently perfect new girl. In Tim Parks’ consummate translation, “Sweet Days of Discipline” is a peerless, terrifying, and gorgeous work.

From Clare Pearson, book buyer : “Sweet Days of Discipline” is a stony reflection on years spent in a Swiss boarding school. The narrator deftly captures the fervent and ineffable quality of youth and young friendship while imbuing the narrative with a kind of wistful distance. This contradiction, which is both rare and characteristic of the best writing about childhood, results in an excellent (and very quick) read.

---

From the publisher: In each of these 12 stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise’s father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her 40s, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie’s bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie’s own age—everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party.

As psychologically astute as they are emotionally rich, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams.

From Mo Kirk, membership coordinator: Let me start with an embarrassing confession. Somehow I had not read Tessa Hadley’s many novels or short stories before. This collection, published last year, made me an instant fan. The reader is dropped into different ordinary life events happening to ordinary women and girls…a funeral, a chance encounter with an ex on the Tube, or as in the last story (Coda) bunking with family during COVID lockdown. Hadley reveals in these the under-surface family tensions and her characters’ desires for a different path. Her style is precise, stark, and at times unsettling. It also is deceptively spare.

I found breathtaking the amount of backstory she can reveal in a very short piece of writing. She leaves (or simply trusts) the reader to figure out much of it on our own. After reading these stories I knew the characters better than I had the right to given their brief existence on the page.

---

From the publisher: A slender novel of epic power, “Orbital” deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space—not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over 17,000 miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet.

From Yana Kucher, staff: Samantha Harvey’s newest novella feels like a peek through an old-fashioned kaleidoscope, shards of colored glass shifting as you turn the page. We get glimpses of their daily lives in this gravity-free environment—their exercises, meals, communications with family; and we also follow along with their thoughts as they reflect on their pasts and key moments in their lives. This is not a book with a complicated plot structure or a lot of action. Instead, you get some beautifully lyrical descriptions of our planet as seen from afar, and an exploration of six people’s thoughts and contemplation of what life’s all about as they float through space and lovingly observe every segment of the Earth through 16 sunrises and sunsets. The tone is one of awe and wonder, rather than despair or cynicism, even in the face of the planet’s fragility. Harvey has a clean, sharp style that never falls into sentimentality.

Type of Story: Review

An assessment or critique of a service, product, or creative endeavor such as art, literature or a performance.