A novel built out of linked absences, chance encounters, and lives brushing past one another.

A Shock moves through a London boarding house and the people orbiting it. A woman disappears. A man waits for messages that may or may not come. Old residents linger in the building’s atmosphere long after they’ve gone. Ridgway doesn’t treat these as tidy plot threads so much as pressure points, letting them echo across the book until the city itself starts to feel unstable, half-inhabited, faintly haunted.

Ridgway has been circling this kind of form for a while, but here it’s pared right back. If you like fiction that resists neat containment and instead accumulates meaning through adjacency and absence, this lands quietly and then stays with you.

2021 Picador hardback. Very good condition in and out.