You Have a Friend in 10A: Stories

In this follow-up to her Booker short-listed Great Circle, Shipstead displays luminous, exacting language as she demonstrates her flair for creating distinctive characters who deal more or less successfully with what life has handed them. A teenage girl fleeing an ugly home situation ends up as a horse wrangler, appreciating the man who hires her though she cannot return his love. A newbie novelist is only beginning to realize what a pretentious jerk he was in graduate school. In the standout “Souterrain” (“subterranean” in French), feckless Iris inherits a house in Paris from her blind grandfather, Pierre, and a story unfolds of a family tragedy during World War II; Pierre’s guilt over his inadvertent role in events, despite his youth; the painfully suppressed past of his housekeeper, Madame Harmou; and the tragic misunderstanding that dooms her son. Here as elsewhere, the characters’ lives are shaped by unexpected or hidden events, large and small, and in the end Pierre’s memories “will join the dark matter that surrounds the living: the memories of the dead, undetectable but still exerting force.”