Spent Light (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781968671440)

"Domestic objects lead to intimate memories and troubled histories in this glorious, genre-bending book." --The Guardian

An unnamed woman contemplates the toaster she's inherited from a neighbor. A homely, useful sort of object, hardly worthy of a sonnet or still-life. And yet, thinking of where its parts originated, who assembled it, and how it arrived at her door, could it not be considered as much a source of awe as any waterfall of battlefield? Numbed as she may be by life, can she still see fear in a handful of crumbs?

There is nothing else in contemporary fiction quite like this quest to think through the common objects making up a comfortable, middle-class life, seeing in them all the "global networks of resource extraction and forced labour, technologies of industrial murder, histories of genocide, alongside traditions of craft, the pleasures of convenience and dexterity, the giving and receiving of affection and care." (Jennifer Hodgson)

An atomized Mrs. Dalloway, featuring a narrator imprisoned and finally freed by her unrelenting focus on the tiniest details of modern living--part smelly, bodily struggle; part digital, frictionless ease--Spent Light, here accompanied by a new foreword by Teju Cole, stands as a masterly anatomy of our moment in time, politically, poetically, and personally.