Sublime

The air outside rumbles as planes lift into the sky, while inside garbled announcements blare over the loudspeaker. Somewhere behind me, an older woman speaks in sharp, staccato Italian. But I don’t look away from the curb, my eyes trained on the crowded sidewalk outside the terminal, searching for her, anchoring my belief—and my entire future—on t

For another thing,

a hamburger the size of a Susan B. Anthony dollar. All day long I installed doorknobs. It was all right.

that to leave Finland or any other Nordic country behind and settle in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century was to experience an extraordinary—and extraordinarily harsh—form of travel backward in time.

had started dumping sachets of mushroom powder into his metal water bottle. Alex had tried a sip: it made the water taste swampy and expensive.

Her

Recently, Violet had had the disturbing realisation that she was old.

Doug had met another woman while visiting a friend in Tucson, and they’d fallen in love. For a while they’d sent a flurry of faxes to each other, then several days passed without Doug hearing from her.