Oh, how the stories of a place are captured or distorted over the years: is the house doomed, or does it doom? Makkai's book meditates on identity, belonging and isolation, and the tide of a century. "We aren't haunted by the dead," she writes, "but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we'd be to them."
impossible reach of history