Extract

Are you really planning to go home?

An amateur entomologist descends into a sand pit to collect beetles and finds himself trapped at the bottom with a woman whose sole occupation is shoveling sand to keep her house from being buried. From this premise Abe constructs a parable of existential captivity so physically precise that the reader feels the grit in every pore: sand in the food, sand in the bedding, sand sliding ceaselessly down the walls. The villagers above lower water and supplies; escape is always almost possible and never quite achieved. The novel refuses allegory even as it invites it, and what accumulates, grain by grain, is something stranger than metaphor: the terrifying recognition that confinement, given enough time, becomes indistinguishable from home.