Hardboiled: & Hard Luck

About

Two novellas about women at turning points. In "Hardboiled," a young woman takes a solo hiking trip through the mountains on the anniversary of her ex-lover's death, and her dreams become entangled with memories she thought she'd buried. In "Hard Luck," a woman keeps vigil beside her comatose sister, watching the boundary between life and death become strangely thin. Banana Yoshimoto pairs these stories for their shared preoccupation with loss that hasn't quite finished happening — grief that exists in the present tense, where the dead and the living still overlap. Two quiet, precise explorations of what it feels like to carry someone who is gone but not yet absent.