Character study
Novelists aren’t necessarily oracles, but they do tend to be a little bit of a canary in the coal mine – they look around the world, they pay attention, says Laura Lippman. “There’s this thing bubbling through fiction right now where there are books that seem to be somewhat prescient. Rumaan Alam wrote Leave the World Behind, which is about an unspecified catastrophe and people are stranded and no one really knows what’s going on. That book came out during the pandemic but was written beforehand. And there’s a book I saw from the writer Will Leitch, which also sort of involves a [confined at home] Rear Window scenario.”
Lippman is settled in the, an intensely claustrophobic tale of a famed novelist isolated in his Baltimore apartment who gets a phone call from someone claiming she’s the key character in his most important novel. Does Gerry Anderson have a dangerous stalker or is he losing his mind?
