No Book but the World by Leah Hager Cohen

No Book but the World

Leah Hager Cohen

Twenty-something Ava looks back on her childhood and youth in the face of younger brother Fred's being accused of murder. As she does so, this amazing book raises questions of love or duty, experience vs storytelling, freedom or license and what is normality? To me, perhaps most interestingly, Ava asks whether we can ever understand each other? Highly recommended.

Extract
We have always been foreigners, Fred and I, always and everywhere and by design; our parents taught us to conceive of ourselves that way, and it has been forever true, and we loved it some of the time, it served us well, and it has also been our enduring loneliness.
Well. My enduring loneliness.
What do I know anymore of Fred.
Parallels
  • Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan
  • All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
  • A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard