Writing on the Wall

As Renata, a linguist for the New York City Public Library, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge on her way to work one morning, she looks up to see a flash of orange and blue. Two planes have hit the World Trade Center, and with that, her world changes entirely.

 

Renata’s connection to the tragedy grows deeper as her boyfriend, an overzealous social worker, begins to take care of a baby orphaned by the attacks. And then she meets a mute teenage girl in the rubble of the Twin Towers who may or may not be her long lost niece—a family connection as tenuous as it is painful. The winner of New York magazine’s Best Literary Fiction award in 2005, this novel evocatively represents the forms of grief in the wake of major trauma.