Legacies

Starling Lawrence's evocative and subtle stories are about illuminations that alter the course of ordinary lives, about moments where the known world is dissolved in fierce recognition. Whether the characters are young or old, or caught in the middle passages of life, the binding energy in Lawrence's fiction is love, which manifests itself in surprising ways and invests the details of place and time with an eerie significance: the light falling at a certain angle on a pattern of wood, the smell of a hay barn or a burning pencil, the puzzle of a torn photograph. There are no bizarre twists of plot here, no trick endings. Instead, there is a sense of unfinished business, evocative intimations of what lies beyond and around the narrative: other rooms, corridors, doorways, points of access to the reader's imagination.