False Entry

In the vein of Eudora Welty and Charles Dickens, Hortense Calisher’s astounding first novel examines a young man’s detachment from the world—and his struggle to rejoin it Pierre Goodman enjoys an idyllic childhood as the son of a widowed dressmaker in post–World War I England. But paradise is ripped from him at age ten when he and his mother immigrate to a small town in Alabama. Yearning to regain peace within his own mind and aided by his photographic memory, he begins falsely but completely en