The narrator of this fable-like tale has been released from prison in Pakistan after fifteen years and recuperates with the help of a benevolent stranger. Every day, he visits the orchard of his family home, an idyllic place where he fell in love as a teen-ager. The novella is addressed to his love, because “love must be shared, or else it is just madness.” In beautiful, unadorned prose, Hobbs ruminates on love as it exists in our memory. But the story, moving back and forth in time, ultimately feels somewhat distant. “Time softens all griefs,” Hobbs writes. Perhaps. Yet the power of literature, one hopes, is to render them anew.
