The Box by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

A stylistically dazzling novel about objects, people, and the forces and
seams between them.
Of course, each thing has its own sides to every story.
In a dark and crooked lane in an unnamed city where it never ceases to snow,
a small white box falls from a coat pocket. It is made of paper strips woven
tightly together; there is no apparent way to open it without destroying it. What
compels a passing witness, a self-described anthrophobe not inclined to
engage with other people, to pick up the box and chase after the stranger who
dropped it?
The Box follows an impenetrable rectangle as it changes hands in a
collapsing metropolis, causing confluences, conflicts, rifts, and disasters.
Different narrators, each with a distinctive voice, give secondhand accounts of
decisive moments in the box's life. From the anthrophobe to a newly hired
curator of a renowned art collection, from a couple who own an antiquarian
bookshop to a hotel bartender hiding from a terrible past, the storytellers
repeat rumors and rely on faulty memories, grasping at something that
continually escapes them. Haunting their recollections is one mysterious
woman who, convinced of the box's good or evil powers, pursues it with
deadly desperation.
In this mesmerizing, intricately constructed puzzle of a novel, Mandy-Suzanne
Wong challenges our understanding of subjects and objects, of cause and
effect. Is it only humans who have agency? What is or isn't animate? What do
we value and what do we discard?
The Box is an extraordinary novel, gamesome and philosophical. Not since
Borges have I experienced fiction as a perfect maze or puzzle, endlessly
pleasing. The reader enters it, fascinated, just as s/he goes out into the snow,
which is always falling. Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a writer to watch." - Amina
Cain, author of A Horse at Night and Indelicacy

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. Her works
include the novel Drafts of a Suicide Note, the essay collection Listen, we all
bleed, and the chapbooks Awabi and Artificial Wilderness

Graywolf Press
On Sale: Sep 19/23
5.5 x 8.25 • 264 pages
9781644452493 • $17.00 • pb
Fiction / Literary