Emily Mernin

In December 1998, Chloe wanders through her aunt’s apartment in Toulon, France. She has only a few hours to herself before her father’s sister comes out of surgery. The small flat — which once belonged to the thirty-two-year-old writer’s paternal grandparents — has been the only constant familial home she’s known. It served as an immovable…

The unnamed narrator of Hides realizes his mother is dead by touching her. “It is not enough to say that the hand had grown cold, though it had, very cold, in fact,” he recalls, “but the veins themselves, the gentle throb of blood coursing across her papery, liver-spotted skin, seemed depreciated — flattened.” Rod Moody-Corbett’s remarkable debut is about the protective walls that go up as we…

An unnamed narrator opens the final chapter of Rachel Cusk’s novel Parade: “Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did — the rest of her remained obstinately alive.” The balance consists, in part, of their revelations after the drawn-out death of their unknowable, distant parent. Months after her…