The best of them.

Read across the last fortnight of November, in the dark at both ends of the day, which is possibly the wrong season for it and possibly the only one.

It's a letter from a dying man to a son who will read it as an adult, and almost nothing happens in it. There's a baseball on the radio, a bicycle, a fire, a bad grandfather, a good and impossible father, and a young man come home whom Ames cannot bring himself to be fair to. That's the whole of it.

I have never read anybody better on light. Not lyrical about light, precise about it. Water thrown up in an arc off a hand and going through the sun. Wet pavement. A face lit from below. She writes light the way you would write a species account, with that much care about the exact conditions, and it is the sentences I keep going back to rather than the story.

The theology I don't share and don't have to. What I take from it is a man trying to be good at the one thing he isn't naturally good at, which is loving the person actually in front of him rather than people in general. He fails at it for most of the book. He knows he's failing. The letter is his working-out, left on the table.

I've given it to four people and two of them found it slow. Fair enough, it is slow. It's the kind of slow where you look up after twenty pages and the light has gone and you didn't notice it going.

Ten, and I don't hand those out.