Strange to consider a book quiet when one of its central plot points is a woman being eaten by a lion, and yet Rowland's Transcriptionist felt contemplative, meditative. The narrator wrestles with life, death, and her own unlikely obsessions, struggling to make sense of an unlikely act and how a chance encounter informs her own day to day. The writing is measured, and some of the imagery simply haunting:
She puts the book back on the shelf and stares at the row of spines. For the first time, she thinks of bookshelves as plots in a vast potter's field, except these dead can be claimed and known each time someone selects them from the shelf.
I may never look at my library the same way again.