From the award-winning author of the book-length essay This Little
Art, a debut novel that reaches back to the start of the novel
tradition and outward to the complexities of contemporary life.
Kate Brigg's debut novel--the follow-up to her acclaimed This Little
Art--is the story of a young mother, Helen, awake with her baby.
Together they are moving through a morning routine that is in one sense
entirely ordinary--resting, feeding, pacing. Yet in the closeness of
their rented flat, such everyday acts take on epic scope, thoughts and
objects made newly alive in the light of their shared attention. Then
the rhythm of their morning is interrupted: a delivery person arrives
with a used copy of Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, which Helen
has ordered online. She begins to read, and attention shifts. As their
day unfolds, the intimate space Helen shares with her baby becomes
entwined with Fielding's novel, with other books and ideas, and with
questions about class and privilege, housing and caregiving, and the
support structures that underlie durational forms of codependency, both
social and artistic.
