Protected: The Right Enchantment Brings the Universe to a Goat Pen in Idaho

It feels rare in an age of information overload to come to a book cold, without any expectation. But that is how I first came to Emily Ruskovich’s writing. Reading the first few pages in a bookshop, captivated by her language—so lyrical and yet so precise—and by her remarkable evocation of place, I felt the singular thrill of discovery. I read the book, Idaho, over the next few days and have been pressing it into the hands of friends ever since.

I can think of few novels that have haunted me the way Ruskovich’s has, and so I was thrilled to be offered an early chance to read Nightjar, her new collection of stories, and even more delighted to discover that what I relished in Idaho is evident in these pages, too.

Here are five stories of enduring love—marital, parental, and fraternal—of the hurts and indignities of childhood, the wonder of the natural world, of seemingly harmless lies that grow and swell and threaten to overwhelm their tellers. Above all, Ruskovich seems to understand in a way few writers do how the shifting sands of memory shape the stories we tell about ourselves and determine the people we will become.

In a collection of provocative and playful tales, “Nightjar” is the strangest. A magical realist fable set on a remote farm, it tells the story of Tess, a lonely but resilient 12-year-old girl who stumbles upon a miraculous secret.

Left alone for the summer by her parents (who run a logging company), Tess fends for herself and her beloved four-year-old brother Rory. She feeds the chickens and tends the goats, and she desperately misses her older brother Avery, who has recently moved out to live with his girlfriend. Friendless and isolated, Tess’s secret discovery is transformative, giving her comfort and purpose.

I grew up a long way from the northwestern United States, described so vividly in Ruskovich’s writing, and yet these stories stirred in me a fierce nostalgia for my childhood, for the boredom of long, empty afternoons in a time before the internet and 24-hour television, and for the self-reliance and imagination those afternoons demanded.

In the kind of clear and distinctive prose that earned her the O. Henry Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, Ruskovich reveals in these stories how all lives are, in their way, momentous, how miracles can happen in any life, even the quiet ones, the seemingly unremarkable ones lived by girls left all alone to care for little brothers and ill-tempered goats.

– Paula Hawkins
Author of The Blue Hour