Too lovely to even try to review. Full of pathos, humour and whimsy. Loved it. Rather, I’ll share some favourite quotes and descriptions:

Bob had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it.

Bob liked Maria instantly. She seemed sly to the world’s foolishness, something like a cat’s attitude of critical doubtfulness, but she also beheld a cat’s disposition of: surprise me.

“Brighty has been married five times, Bob.”
“What do you think about that?” Brighty asked Bob.
“I think that’s a lot of times to be married,” Bob answered.
“I like a big party, is what it is,” said Brighty. “And I’ll take a wedding over a funeral any day of any week, it it’s all the same to you.”

Why do you read rather than live?

He felt uncomplicated love for such things as paper, and pencils, and pencils writing on paper, and erasers and scissors and staples, paper clips, the scent of books, and the words on the pages of the books. Sometimes he thought of the women and men who’d composed these documents sitting at their desks and aiming for the elusive bull’s-eye and almost always missing but sometimes not, and Bob was certain that a room filled with printed matter was a room that needed nothing.

“Don’t you like kids?”
“I don’t know any kids.”
“Maybe you don’t like the idea of them.”
“No, to be honest, I don’t. It’s a steep investment for a woman, with unreliable returns.”

“This work is not our strongest. It is not bad work, but it doesn’t have the power of our past labours. That power, which was once effortless, and which we wielded as if it were the most natural thing in the world, is now dimming, and there isn’t any vitamin or medicine I can find to remedy the lack. The watch winds down, Bob Comet, the pebbles of sand slip through the trim waist of the hourglass, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“Melancholy is the wistful identification of time as thief, and it is rooted in memories of past love and success. Sorrow is a more hopeless proposition. Sorrow is the understanding you shall not get that which you crave and, perhaps, deserve, and it is rooted in, or encouraged by, excuse me, the death impulse."

Maria understood that part of ageing, at least for many of us, was to see how misshapen and imperfect our stories had to be. The passage of time bends us, it folds us up, and eventually, it tucks us right into the ground.