When Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis

In Fiona McFarlane’s story, an Australian woman imagines telling her husband the story of a couple she used to know in Sydney, who repeatedly told their own story, about a girl they once met, a young backpacker from Switzerland, who had fought with her boyfriend and took refuge for a night in their home while they were expecting their first child. Story after story is peeled back, and at the center of the onion is a horrific act, the details of which remain unknown to the reader. With this controlled approach to revealing and withholding information, McFarlane questions the appeal of true-crime narratives, our voyeuristic approach to tragedy, and, as she says in an accompanying interview, “the ripple effects” of violence “in the lives of people who are one or two or five or fifty steps removed” from it.

—Deborah Treisman, fiction editor