Five Tuesdays in Winter

National Book Critics Circle award winner King (Euphoria) delivers a rich and varied collection filled with characters whose lives are transformed by old and new acquaintances, addiction, and the written word. In the opener, “Creature,” teenage narrator Carol finds summer employment as a nanny while she reads Jane Eyre, a novel that has strange and fascinating resonances for her. In “When in the Dordogne,” the narrator, a “martini baby, conceived after one too many in late July 1971,” struggles in the wake of his father’s failed suicide. “The Man at the Door,” the collection’s finest entry, finds a writer who’s also a mother experiencing the heaven of her avocation—“This morning, however, a sentence rose, a strange unexpected chain of words meeting the surface in one long gorgeous arc”—before being quickly brought back down to earth: “The baby bleated through the monitor. She’d only managed to get three sentences on the page.” These stories crackle and shine, and King is a master of the thumbnail portrait: she can create a fully realized life in a single paragraph and then alter it in breathtaking ways. This is a must for fans of the short story. Agent: Julie Barer, the Barer Group. (Nov.)