Spent Light

“Domestic objects lead to intimate memories and troubled histories in this glorious, genre-bending book.” —The Guardian

A woman contemplates the toaster she’s inherited from a neighbor. A homely and practical sort of object, it seems hardly worthy of a sonnet or still-life. And yet, thinking of where its parts originated, who assembled it, and how it arrived at her door, could it not be considered as much a source of awe as any mountaintop or battlefield? Numbed as life may make us, can we not still be shown fear in a handful of breadcrumbs?

Little else in contemporary fiction can compare to this poetic, funny, and frankly political journey through the unextraordinary objects making up a comfortable, middle-class life. Teasing out all the trivia, history, sensation, memory, romance, and regret inherent in the materials we take for granted—the wheat in our bread, the cobalt in our phones—Spent Light is the living record of a mind “listening closely for what may be said by the things that use her to get their words out,” as Teju Cole writes in his foreword to this first American edition.

An atomized Mrs. Dalloway, starring a nameless narrator hemmed in by minutiae yet finally freed by the poetic leaps she is inspired to take by the detritus of modern living, Spent Light stands as a masterly anatomy of our moment in history, and all of the stories, the pain and the beauty, hiding in even its least significant detail.