Terrace Story | Hilary Leichter

This slim volume is a different kind of book. Kind of odd, really, but also thought-provoking and sad but wonderful. The writing is exquisite. Terrace Story began its life as a short story and grew (you'll get it in a minute) to become a novel comprised of four connected stories.

You start by meeting Annie and Edward who move into a smaller apartment to save money with their newborn daughter Rose. Annie's friend Stephanie comes over to visit and opens a door, literally, to reveal a beautiful terrace with a sunset view and gorgeous furnishings. You don't learn how until later (second story), but the terrace only appears when Stephanie is there. Stephanie can make space, but one day she made the space hers alone and changed everything. The book is a dazzling combination of magical realism, sci-fi, and themes of love, loneliness, loss, time and space. Rose, and her descendants, is the character who is the connective tissue between the four sections of the book. The last section is in the future when humans have left Earth to colonize "suburbs" in space.

Here's a quote to give you a feel for the prose: When Stephanie returned for a Sunday brunch, the terrace returned too. It was resplendent in the afternoon sun, the wooden slats dappled with light and strewn with acorns, gold and orange leaves underfoot. Annie didn’t expect that you could yearn for a place so terribly after visiting it only once. There were other places she missed, treasured territories lifted off the earth, shuttered, gone. But the terrace arrived upon her with the relief of a long-awaited reunion. Annie felt a chill, because it was a reunion with herself. She had been accommodating some unknown injury for years, and it had silently joined the daily landscape of known feeling. Now, standing on the terrace, she woke to find her forgotten wound healed.

Some reviewers had suggested reading the sections out of order, but that seems like a bad idea. Read it like she wrote it.