Ghosts

As spare and elegant as her highly praised short novels Light and Waking, Eva Figes's Ghosts captures the experience of aging. In prose that seems to measure the very beat of passing time, we follow her heroine, an unnamed woman, through four seasons of a single year and watch her come to terms with her former lover, her grown children, and, finally, the ghostly self that she is slowly becoming. She moves through streets that have changed their contours, landscapes in constant flux, in a body slowly turning into her mother's.

As her character poignantly lets go of possessions, memories, and all that she holds dear, Figes turns the ordinary occurrences of daily life – eating breakfast, having tea, weeding a garden – into luminous events through the clarity and beauty of her writing.