Cape Cod, 1950. A lonely young German boy, recently arrived in America after the war, is taken in for the summer by a well-connected couple living near the artists Edward and Jo Hopper.

As the boy moves between households, beaches and adult conversations he only partly understands, he becomes an uneasy witness to marriage, art, exile and postwar American life.

Christine Dwyer Hickey writes with precision about loneliness and observation: the child watching adults, the painter watching light, the wife watching the life around her narrow into someone else’s work. The Narrow Land is especially strong on atmosphere, turning Hopper’s world of rooms, windows, beaches and silences into fiction without reducing the artists to biographical furniture. A restrained, elegant novel about art, damage and the lives caught at the edge of the frame.

Great condition, paperback copy.