Nails and Eyes

The narrator is a girl of three, and she tells everything to 'you': the woman her father was seeing behind her mother's back, having met her at an eye clinic after a contact lens scratched her eye. When the mother dies, the father asks this woman to marry him, and she moves in. The child talks to her constantly, though back then she had no words for any of it, and the stepmother would not have listened anyway. She notices only what she cares to notice, and nothing frightens her. The girl gnaws at her nails, eats sweets in silence and grows plump, while her father, too, has a talent for not seeing. The telling roams freely between past, present and future, and the question of why the mother died hangs over the house.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novella

Length

125 pages in the original

Genres

Family (assigned by AI)

First published

2013 by Shinchosha

Author's age

33 when first published

ISBN

9784103345114 (original)

9781782279549 (Pushkin Press, United Kingdom)