Poet and novelist Sasha Fletcher blends heartbreak and unexpected hope in Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World, a surreal exploration of an impending apocalypse. Amid hip-high snowstorms and mountains of steaming trash, Sam and Eleanor are in love. Ever since the sky split open when they met at summer camp, the world has tried to push them apart; stubbornly, they stay together. And as news of nuclear warfare and a bomb soon to be dropped on New York City sends people into a tailspin, Sam and Eleanor continue to find meaning in good dinners, old movies and their unshakeable love for one another.
While this is a love story at its core, it is also a novel of rich digressions, defined by its narrator's tendency to dip in and out of time, touching in equal measure on momentous historical events and quiet, winter nights. As the end draws near, Fletcher (It Is Going to Be a Good Year) suggests, time unspools into a collection of forevers that are made meaningful by moments of minute happiness, pockets of unanticipated safety. The no-nonsense tone of Fletcher's prose--as he, for instance, juxtaposes the detailing of park acreage with the biblical weather disasters that Sam and Eleanor experience in the "present"--creates consistent emotional tension. Cinematic in the visual imagery it conjures and consistently surprising in where it focuses its narrator's pristine attention, Be Here to Love Me is sure to leave a lump in readers' throats, rather than leaving them with a sense of doom. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor