Increasingly, food brands have been putting themselves through the same thought exercise: How do you capture the taste of space? Right now, I have the option of buying multiple space-flavored foods, all of them approximating the concept from different angles. Some use the lens of realism, drawing on what we know to exist in our galaxy. Others see the prompt more as world-building, dreaming up a galaxy and then flavors that might fit into it. Others still are hopping on the bandwagon in name alone, slapping the word “space” onto releases that would make sense in any other context.
For many New Yorkers, their local bodega holds a special place in their hearts. The bodega is more than just your average convenience store — or, god forbid, the tiny corner-store-sized Whole Foods Market Daily Shop. It’s a testament to the city’s vibrant immigrant communities, a cultural hub that’s steeped in rich history and filled with love from generations past. Where supermarkets are closed, the bodegas are open. Not to mention that these local stores are also home to some of New York’s most iconic dishes: chopped cheese, bacon-egg-and-cheese and chicken cutlets, just to name a few. Even amid a ruthless pandemic, the bodega persevered and continued to serve as the backbone of NYC. So it makes sense why bodega culture is such a big deal amongst city dwellers. Where you go and, most importantly, what you get matters.
There’s always a moment in the journey from Dublin to London – which I make every month or two, taking the land-and-sea route via Holyhead instead of flying – when I stop what I’m doing – reading or writing or chatting to the person next to me – and think: you don’t get to enjoy this from 40,000ft.
Thomas’s foundation stone is a peerlessly deft and nuanced skill at creating character, from the manipulative Isabella to the weak, snobbish, pampered Richard, clinging to redemption by a shred of honest instinct. But it is Evelyn on whose believability the novel rests, and she is a masterly creation: prickly, insecure, self-dramatising; an overthinker, at once sly and prone to blurting out truths; a zigzagger, a back-tracker, in flight from her own damage, lustful and with a hopelessly thwarted capacity for love. As a writer, Evelyn is also the ultimate unreliable narrator, and Thomas must carry off that fiendishly difficult trick of making her evasions and exaggerations visible while allowing them the power to deceive, and eventually, haltingly, guiding her towards revelation. Clever, emotionally resonant, packed with startling twists and dark turns and very funny indeed, this is fiction roaring on all cylinders.
As the title suggests, the story is bookended by two referenda, when the Eighth Amendment was introduced in 1982 and when it was repealed nearly 40 years later. Three generations of women, three different experiences of women’s rights, religion, and love pulling at their various sleeves, are detailed in the interweaving timelines.