My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.

Recently abandoned women can be complicated.

Natalie Bakopoulos has that rare gift, the ability to imagine a traumatic historical event in the form of individual lives and ordinary details. The Green Shore is compelling, personal, and full of quietly real moments.

Faith is simply whatever is real to us.

Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.

I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist.

As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.