The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix.

The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call 'Summer sisters' is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house her brother has muscular dystrophy her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. ' Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, severed, turned around.These words are my abode, my only foothold.' Fortunately, she has a plan that may change things for her. ' As time progresses, the view seems to darken. Though she claims solitude 'has become trade,' she admits 'it plagues. One day, one of the otherwise invisible lovers she refers to butt dials her over and over when he calls to invite her to dinner that night, she refuses. Troubled by unresolved feelings about her dead father and elderly mother, the narrator is not much closer to her friends and lovers than to the people she so carefully observes in her meanderings about town.

In 46 brief chapters identified by 'whereabouts'-'On the Sidewalk,' 'At the Ticket Counter,' 'By the Sea,' 'In My Head,' etc.-the narrator gives her impressions of the people and places she encounters in her provincial European city, not noticeably Italian until the last chapter, when she watches some tourists on the train practice saying arrivederci. Lahiri now lives in Italy, wrote this book in Italian, and translated it herself. Its spare, reflective prose and profound interiority recall the work of Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez as much as Lahiri's earlier fiction, which generally focused on the Indian immigrant experience in the U.S. And I would tell her how much I liked to sit outside, pick up a warm pen, and write down a sentence or two': Here the melancholy narrator of Lahiri's first book of fiction since The Lowland (2013) explains how she responded to a therapist's request to say something positive at every session-perhaps suggesting the genesis of the book in our hands. Instead I would tell her about the balcony of my apartment when the sun is shining and I'm having breakfast. 'Unfortunately my childhood harbors few happy memories.

A year in the inner life of a solitary woman in an unnamed European city.

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