CROSSFIRE

Maris Mayor carries her past the way some people carry a wound — badly concealed, never quite healed. A sequence of choices she cannot undo, and an affair with Nick Angelo that broke something she had not realised was breakable, have left her in a life she barely recognises as her own.

Anantinee Mishra's novel works in the space between the external and the internal — between the crossfire that comes from other people and the one that never stops in Maris's own head. The lies she lives with are not all ones she told; the guilt is not all deserved. But sorting out which is which requires her to look at herself more honestly than she has managed yet.

For readers who want fiction that takes its characters seriously — that treats emotional wreckage as something to be understood rather than simply suffered — Crossfire offers a story about the long reckoning that follows when we choose badly and then have to live in the aftermath.