Books
A Single Visitor
A Novel
A Single Visitor
Tony has spent his adult life arranging the world into columns that balance. A Berlin financier of exceptional competence and nearly total emotional withdrawal, he keeps grief, warmth, and disorder at a careful distance, with good reason: his mother died when he was still becoming himself, and he has been compensating ever since. In a city of glass and commerce, this passes for strength.
She is always in the same café, in Chicago. Always alone, always with a book, always slightly apart from the life moving around her. Call her Ti. She has been hurt before, and she has decided, with the particular decisiveness of the wounded, that she will not be hurt again.
They meet once, briefly, in the early morning, when each is on a separate trajectory. What follows is the question the novel turns on: whether two people shaped by solitude can bear the cost of its opposite.
A Single Visitor unfolds with the patience and social sweep of an earlier century’s fiction, rich in social observation, philosophical in temperament, and genuinely interested in the complicated architecture of human feeling.
An Excerpt
Chapter One, The Most Precious Thing: Family
The man of her dreams had just received a promotion. The one he had fought for over the past several years. Now he was the executive director of an investment company!
He had begun as an ordinary employee eight years ago, and here, at last, he stood at the summit. Pride overwhelmed him, though one could not have called him a sensitive man. His new office seemed impossibly vast, which was only partly true, but then, who in the grip of feeling has never made the world a little larger than it is.
He stood motionless at the window. Before him spread a magnificent view of the new part of Berlin. And below, the River Spree flowed past, bringing freshness to stuffy offices in summer.
The Setting
Berlin
Dependable, clear-headed, consumed by numbers: Tony learned early to keep grief and warmth at a careful distance, in a city of glass, ambition, and control that rewards exactly that instinct.
Chicago
Always the same café. Always alone, always with a book. Cold on the surface and carefully guarded underneath, Ti has built a life here just small enough to keep her safe.
More titles forthcoming