Review by Matthew Spellberg

The epistolary novel is a novel’s novel, a nested box in which the conventions of prose-writing are made the explicit framework for storytelling. Mikhail Shishkin’s The Light and the Dark is a novel in letters between two lovers, a man at war, a woman at home. Their correspondence plays out beyond time and space—in China in 1900, in Russia about a century later, and in magical landscapes somewhere in between. To stake a literary novel on Love’s power to reconcile the universe to itself is not unprecedented, but it is unusual . . .