A child embraces magic in a hotel corridor and watches an angel fall from a white-hot sky. A young woman finds her mate by the light of a candle of a particular shade of blue. A wife slips the bonds of her marriage on a beach in Mexico. This collection of stories lays bare a woman's mind.

Review

Canadian writer Merilyn Simonds's first book is an exquisite, beguiling collection of interlinked stories. Rendering one woman's life from childhood into motherhood and middle age, The Lion in the Room Next Door begins in Brazil where the narrator is living in the Hotel Terminus with her parents and sisters, waiting for her father's new factory to be finished so they can move into a house. She spies on the other guests, even on her own father as he eats his breakfast alone, and is preoccupied by a sound she hears beneath the hotel's life, at night, a rumbling that "moves through the wall by my head," then "recedes like the tide." She goes searching for the source of the sound, slipping out of her bedroom at night, or dreaming she has slipped out. It is the sound of childhood enchantment, where everywhere you look you see a buried life.

As the book progresses, the narrator travels the world and crosses the threshold into her erotic life. Foreign places are full of the promise of sex and the threat of predatory men: the leering porter, the soldier with a gun on the beach who eyes her as she swims. Throughout she is involved in various complicated affairs, and sex moves more and more to the forefront of her story, becoming the thing that hums below the surface, the big mystery, the same mystery over and over. Alas, the narrator's preoccupation with her sexual power becomes a little tiresome--like a girlfriend who talks about men all the time, sometimes I wished Simonds would change the subject. Nevertheless The Lion in the Room Next Door is a formidable debut, full of shining moments and careful lyricism. --Emily White

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