From the cover of The Violins of Saint-Jacques.

I bet you didn’t know that Patrick Leigh Fermor, recognized as Britain’s greatest travel writer during his lifetime, penned a novel, or that it was adapted into a three-act opera in 1966. No new productions are scheduled, but The Violins of Saint-Jacques was reissued last week, so I’ve spent my mornings with a nameless narrator listening to Berthe de Rennes, an elderly Frenchwoman, recall a Mardi Gras ball on the titular Caribbean island in February 1902. The Violins is a kind of travel book, too: chock-full of elaborate details about French architecture, local politics, geography, and the weather. The moldering French aristocracy’s tense relations with local “creoles” are never far from view, nor is the Romeo-and-Juliet-style plot between the mayor’s and governor’s families. The island’s volcano lingers above the lot. Though Saint-Jacques is a figment, the novel’s later, defining event (spoiler alert) is based on something that occurred in Saint Pierre on Martinique, on the same date. In his travel writing, Fermor had an uncanny ability to take readers somewhere impossible; so, too, with this novel. Saint-Jacques never existed and the world it’s based on is long gone, yet The Violins of Saint-Jacques is a full-color Caribbean cruise–cum–French tragedy, one well worth the trip. —Jeffery Gleaves

The other day, I plucked an advance copy of Meghan O’Rourke’s new collection of poems, Sun in Days, from a colleague’s bookshelf and curled up with it in one of the office reading chairs. Though I had barely begun before having to return to my work, I found myself mesmerized and finished the book later that evening. It’s a slim compendium, just over a hundred and twenty pages, with an arresting cover: a tangerine-colored globule plunging into an aqua-blue backdrop, like blood in seawater. The poems that follow are arresting, too. O’Rourke’s sparse, unguarded verse traverses the mind of a woman preoccupied with loss and longing, recounting the days that were and the ones that will never be. She remembers a childhood in Maine, the smell of fish guts on her father’s overalls; the addict that paces outside her Paris sublet; she writes over and over of the daughter she wants but cannot have and of her mother who’s died. The lines I love most, though, are the ones that heave with a sort of quiet lonesomeness, like these from “The Night Where You No Longer Live”: “Did you love me or did I misunderstand // Do you intend to come back // Will you stay the night.” —Caitlin Youngquist  Read More