Homecoming

by Kate Morton

“I have often found, Sergeant Kelly, that anger is a convenient stand-in when men—or boys—aren’t ready to name their true feeling.”

A Portuguese friend had once given her the word “saudade” when she was trying to describe the feeling of being overcome by a weighty sense of absence for something that couldn’t be had or experienced again; Jess had never forgotten it. That’s how she felt now. She missed the Tambilla of Miller’s book with an intensity that was visceral.

Reading shapes a person. The landscape of books is more real, in some ways, than the one outside the window. It isn’t experienced at a remove; it is internal, vital.