Duplex

Mary and Eddie are meant for each other — but love is no guarantee, not in these suburbs. Like all children, they exist in an eternal present; time is imminent, and the adults of the street live in their assorted houses like numbers on a clock. Meanwhile, ominous rumors circulate, and the increasing agitation of the neighbors points to a future in which all will be lost. Soon a sorcerer’s car will speed down Mary’s street, and as past and future fold into each other, the resonant parenthesis of her girlhood will close forever. Beyond is adulthood, a world of robots and sorcerers, slaves and masters, bodies without souls. In Kathryn Davis, whom the has called “one of the most inventive novelists at work today,” has created a coming-of-age story like no other. Once you enter the duplex — that magical hinge between past and future, human and robot, space and time — there’s no telling where you might come out.