Lonely Hearts Club

Picture yourself finding a novel somewhere with its cover torn off and no identifying marks. It is slim, told in the present tense and in the first person, and beautifully written. The protagonist is solitary, with a longing for love that is rarely satisfied. At the same time, nature provides a powerful solace, as does the protagonist’s work, which is detailed, out of the mainstream, and intensely involving. Although the writing is usually unadorned, the author has a distilled, poetic way of describing how sunlight streaks across a path or how a river meanders its lazy way through a town. But these stylistic grace notes never slow the text’s forward momentum: it reads quickly. It wouldn’t take me long to guess that I had picked up a book by Helen Humphreys.

When an interviewer asked her in 2002 what she was reading , Humphreys mentioned a few titles: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys, and...