"Four potently pithy portraits reveal how our lives are made of the fragments of memories, and the impact of people from our past."
Rich in exquisite observations, and written in a beguilingly taut style, Ia Genberg’s The Details presents addictively shrewd portraits of personal relationships and lingering memories. With four chapters named after four individuals who’ve had a profound effect on the narrator, it’s a short but long-lingering, big impact literary feast that’ll satisfy readers who appreciate the power of slow-burn studies of human experience.
In the throes of a fever, the narrator drifts into recalling four figures from their past. With loss, longing, and liminality often at the fore, The Details perfectly captures the ways people move in and out of our lives, often imprinting themselves, patchwork-like, onto our present selves. For example, consider the language used to describe how the narrator continues to be haunted by one of their former lovers: “Johanna became a person of my past, one of many, and had she not turned into a public figure I’d probably have been more successful in forgetting her…it would have withered and waned until, like a badly restored painting, only a few incoherent fragments remained.”
Perfectly paced, and uniquely poignant, after reading this, you’ll most likely be drawn to ponder memories of people from your own past, and their persistent impact.
Featured in The New Yorker's "Best Books of 2023" *Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize
| Primary Genre | General Fiction |
| Other Genres: |
Genberg's marvelous prose is also a kind of fever, mesmerizing and hot to the touch." -The New York Times Book ReviewAn intoxicating novel in the vein of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, about a woman in the throes of a fever remembering the important people in her past, her memories laid bare in vivid detail as her body temperature rises.A woman lies bedridden from a high fever. Suddenly she is struck with an urge to revisit a novel from her past.
The Details features in the following genres: General Fiction, Erotic Fiction, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Sharing Diverse Voices, Shorter Reads, Fiction in translation, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Fiction, Fiction: special features, Fiction: narrative themes
Paperback, Hardback. Not Available.
The Details was written by Ia Genberg and published by Harpervia an imprint of HarperCollins
The Details has 144 pages
