THE VERDIGRIS STORIES

Women and men search for purpose in Sabino’s globe-spanning debut fiction collection.

A Czech woman returns to a seaside Brazilian village following the death of her husband, a wealthy eccentric known for building the town’s strangest house. Despite a less-than-warm welcome from the locals, she begins to fix up the house—but it takes a major change in her circumstances to win the townsfolk over. In a parallel story, the same woman returns to Prague after years in Brazil to an apartment in her grandmother’s building and her old job at the National Film Archive. “I’d always been drawn by unknown places and people presented to me through photographs, films, and documentaries,” she muses, wondering if she’s made a mistake coming back after the death of her husband. “At home, I tended to feel like part of the furniture.” In these 11 stories, time and distance conspire to erode people’s sense of belonging—in their jobs and relationships, in whatever country they happen to be living in. A woman about to be married on a Greek island in “Carol’s Mole” has second thoughts—inspired, in part, by her absent mother’s odd warning about the mole the woman has always borne on her shoulder. In the aptly named story “In Between,” an American woman who recently left her marriage in Hungary finds herself living in a San Francisco hotel with no plan, seeing her dislocation mirrored in the unhoused people she meets on the street. Sabino masterfully finds tension in her characters’ intolerable stasis. “She’s usually someone’s assistant, collaborator, go-to person, but suddenly there was nothing to do in Buda but watch her marriage hold its breath,” she writes of the San Francisco woman. “A tense pause with no end in sight.” Sabino excels at evoking place—not only its physicality, but the psychology of a place—though she doesn’t always force her characters toward a point of crisis. As a result, these pieces often feel more like vignettes than full stories, memorable as they are.

A richly drawn collection of tales about exiles caught between eras of their lives.