Publishers Weekly
★ 06/26/2023
The delightful sophomore effort from Leichter (Temporary) expands on her National Magazine Award–winning story about a magic closet by adding multiple timelines that stretch into the future. When Annie, Edward, and their baby daughter, Rose, are visited by their friend Stephanie in their cramped new apartment, having been forced to move by a rent hike, Stephanie reveals a sprawling terrace behind their closet door, which wasn’t there before. Leichter then switches to the story of George and Lydia, another married couple with a small child, and describes the couple’s unhappiness in novel terms (“They argued about why they were arguing, until every argument collapsed on itself and fit precariously in the bad kitchen cabinet where the miscellany of their marriage languished in obscurity”). In another timeline, Rose, who comes of age in a future on the brink of human extinction, lives on a space station described as a “suburb,” and longs for a lover who’s left on a mission to another suburb. Connecting these threads is Stephanie’s act of manifesting Annie and Edward’s terrace and the reverberations it causes, the details of which Leichter gradually teases out, setting the stage for a deeply satisfying ending. Along the way, there are plenty of wry observations on time and memory (“Then again—most beginnings, apocryphal. Almost always unobserved. Who can remember with any accuracy life’s initial drift toward its final shape?”). Leichter soars with this cogent yet dreamlike tale. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Prepare to be astonished. Like the magical terrace of its title, Hilary Leichter’s spectacular second novel contains the whole world. Told with boundless imagination, wisdom, and effortlessly gorgeous prose, Terrace Story will transform your understanding of time, space, memory, love, longing, and family and make you see your life anew. This book is a wonder.” — Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers
“Hilary Leichter, one of our most original novelists, amazes us again with a beautifully unclassifiable novel. Step out onto the terrace, where space and time, cause and effect, and fiction and reality have been redefined and gorgeously subverted. Terrace Story isn’t a novel you merely read; it’s a book you inhabit.” — Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Trust
"Truly brilliant and profound. There's magic between these covers. Leichter is the master of creating a mood and a world that is both breezy and earth-shattering. I felt changed by this book. Every page is revelatory and left me happily breathless, and the story broke my heart in the best way. I thank the literary heavens for Terrace Story." — Diane Cook, Booker shortlisted author of The New Wilderness
“Terrace Story is brilliantly inventive, enchanting, disturbing, beautiful, and unlike anything I’ve ever read. I loved what it does with time—gone and not gone, lost and found where we never put it. Really extraordinary.” — Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement
"At the book's heart are the relatable grief and terror that go along with love—of our planet, of another—and the threat of losing it...Leichter bends minds—and physics—to give a light touch to deep grief." — Kirkus Reviews
"...A sprawling, gutting romance...Terrace Story’s metaphysical turns are undergirded by intense, emotional precision...We may well outgrow one another the way we outgrow our house, our home, and even our planet. That’s a difficult truth to swallow. Perhaps we can only see it clearly piece by piece, story by story, over a lifetime. That is the pleasure and heartbreak of reading Leichter’s work: the knowledge that sometimes stories have no beginning or end." — BOMB Magazine
“[D]elightful . . . . deeply satisfying. Leichter soars with this cogent yet dreamlike tale.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Terrace Story is fun and profound, fickle and erudite. It is an irresistibly cool book.” — Booklist
"An intelligent and sneakily moving book, perfect for afternoons when you wish you were nowhere other than where you are." — Literary Hub
“The speculative novel is an inventive, wonky meditation on belonging and loneliness, grief and loss that both puzzles the mind and pierces the heart. . . . Terrace Story is an impressive literary feat.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Part of the pleasure of reading Terrace Story is figuring out how its peculiar architecture works. . . . Above all, Leichter is interested in the bewitched space of narrative itself. The fable, with tidy generic conventions but stretchy moral lessons, performs a kind of magic on the novel, giving a slim work legend-like scope.” — New Yorker
"Terrace Story is about dread and loss and the frustrations of finitude, yet its tone is comic and buoyant, almost obstinately optimistic. Ms. Leichter delights in banter and inside jokes, and she finds absurdity, even when it has a dark, Kafkaesque flavor, unfailingly affecting. 'It was love, to recognize the inventions and inconsistencies that make a person whole,' she writes, and it’s love for the mess of humankind that makes this marvelously motley novel so poignant." — Wall Street Journal
“Terrace Story is deeply influenced by the shape and feel of the classic fairy tale, shimmering with the kind of simple language and visceral imagery of a Grimm yarn.. . . . This slender volume, which comes in at just under 200 pages, keeps cozy, heart-wrenching company with the philosophical fiction of Emily St. John Mandel and the rigorous, fantastical imagination of Ted Chiang.” — Washington Post
“Poignant and concise . . . . Even without the Marvel-like theatrics of ‘Everything Everywhere,’ Leichter’s fiction leaves you similarly dizzy with longing — for the versions of yourself now beyond reach, for the people you imagined beside you who are no longer.” — New York Times Book Review
“Terrace Story is funny and sad, tremendous and profound, beautiful and honest even or especially when Leichter is leading us down the strange paths of her brilliant imagination.” — Rumpus
Kirkus Reviews
2023-06-08
A group of characters linked across time and space navigate love and, often, its loss.
In “Terrace Story,” Leichter’s 2020 National Magazine Award–winning short story, Edward and Annie, a young couple, move into a small city apartment with their infant daughter, Rose. One day, they invite Annie’s co-worker Stephanie to dinner, and when Annie opens the door to what is normally a closet, she finds instead a beautiful terrace, bedecked with plants, furnished, filled with twinkling lights. This novel of the same name—though it is as much a collection of linked stories as a traditional novel—takes that piece as its symbolic core and imagines a constellation of characters for whom time and space are slippery at best. Part of the book’s fun is figuring out the characters’ connections to those from other sections, but in perhaps the novel’s most compelling part, “Fortress,” Leichter follows Stephanie, whose power to create and manipulate physical spaces (the reason Annie and Edward’s terrace only appears when she's visiting their apartment) leads to a series of crushing heartbreaks. Leichter is not only interested in micro drama, though; this is also a big-picture look at the Late Anthropocene, with animals continually going extinct and many characters either historians or storytellers (one is a writer whose specialty is extinction). Leichter is juggling plenty of symbolism along with her zingy surrealism-lite and it can be a lot to untangle, but at the book's heart are the relatable grief and terror that go along with love—of our planet, of another—and the threat of losing it. As Leichter writes of one character, “All [she] wanted was a person on the other end of her stories.”
Leichter bends minds—and physics—to give a light touch to deep grief.
