The Shadow Year

A boy grows up on a Long Island street in the early 1960s with an older brother, Jim, and a strange younger sister, Mary, who chalks numbers on everything, speaks in the voice of a dead classmate, and has built in the basement a scale model of the entire neighbourhood, complete with clay figures of everyone in it. Mary moves the figures at night, and where she moves them, people go. Outside, a man in a long white coat has been seen looking through windows, a child disappears, and the boys begin their own investigation on bicycles, in the manner of children who have read too much and understood too little. Their parents are elsewhere: the father working three jobs, the mother drinking in the dark at the kitchen table. Ford writes the ordinary business of a suburban childhood with unusual precision, the school day, the ice cream truck, the accumulating dread of an autumn, and lets the supernatural stay exactly ambiguous enough. It is a novel about the year in which the safe world stops being safe, and about how much of that is the world changing and how much is only learning to see it.