Estate (A Novel)

From the celebrated poet and author of the critically acclaimed novel Inverno comes a mesmerizing new novel, Estate.

Caroline, separated from her husband, finds herself drawn to Lorenzo, who has not one but two other lovers. In these propulsive pages, Caroline herself speaks during a summer of erotic intensity and crisis, recording the stories of seduction, deception, and make-believe she and Lorenzo tell each other—but how true are any of them? Not a sequel to Cynthia Zarin's Inverno but an astounding mirror image in which revelations and responsibilities collide, Estate is a tight, compressed tour de force that sweeps across time and space, from New Guinea to word games, Italian cinema to communication theory, bringing to mind Annie Ernaux and Elena Ferrante, charting the exigencies of desire—and asking how can a person disappear in a hall of stories and reflections?

Many of your stories are about this, how you acquired the last thing you wanted, says Caroline to Lorenzo. But what does Caroline want? How elastic is love? Of Inverno, Sigrid Nunez wrote in The New York Times, “To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art.” In Estate, a summer counterpart to wintry Inverno, Caroline reassembles her field of vision from a trove of gleaming shards.