Light, Coming Back: A Novel

Some books demand to be read slowly, or quickly; they set their own pace and make their own conditions. Light, Coming Back is one of these books. A pensive first novel that tracks its 59-year-old heroine's simultaneous passage through grief and new love, it draws the reader into its own thoughtful, deliberate world, where the choice of an after-dinner drink can spark pages-long memories. The main character, Mrs. Medina, spends much of the novel in her Boston apartment, waiting for her celebrated and much-loved husband, a cellist, to die. He is 86, with a failing but still acute mind. While buying some flowers, Mrs. Medina strikes up a friendship with a much younger woman named Lennie, an aspiring gardener who reminds her of a woman she had been attracted to 20 years earlier, on her honeymoon, but had never spoken to. Soon they begin to meet regularly, and the cautious Mrs. Medina has to balance the rise of this unruly passion against her concern for her dying spouse. A strong debut, delicate but unsentimental. --Regina Marler