Literary Fiction

Reading Post Office felt less like following a plot and more like inhabiting a nervous system under sustained pressure. The novel doesn’t ask whether work is fulfilling or meaningful; it assumes it isn’t, and instead asks what that reality does to a person over time—physically, emotionally, relationally. What happens when showing up becomes the only virtue left. When endurance replaces ambition. When survival masquerades as stability.

Demon narrates with humour, defiance, and a self-awareness that borders on self-protection. He notices everything—the moods of adults, the social hierarchies at school, the way kindness often arrives inconsistently and disappears without warning. He jokes because joking is safer than pleading. He performs because invisibility is dangerous.

At its core, Buckeye is interested in what it means to stay — and what it costs. The novel is set in a Midwestern town that feels immediately familiar, even if you’ve never been there: insular, watchful, shaped by shared history and unspoken rules. Ryan renders this environment with care, capturing the rhythms of small-town life and the way personal histories become communal property.

As the narrative moves backwards, Atmosphere becomes as much a character study as it is a historical novel. Joan’s relationships—particularly with her sister Barbara and her niece Frances—reveal a woman accustomed to carrying emotional labour without complaint. Barbara lives closer to the socially sanctioned script: marriage, motherhood, stability. Joan, by contrast, exists slightly outside the frame. Useful. Reliable. Expected to show up.

At face value, this is a contemporary novel about identical twin sisters on the brink of turning fifty who uncover life-changing truths about their biological origins. But beneath the humour, the heartbreak, the family dynamics, and the beautifully crafted storytelling lies something deeper: a meditation on identity, mortality, belonging, and the cost — and gift — of knowing where you come from.