Description

A haunting new novel by the author of Vengeance in which a chance encounter between a blocked painter and a journalist leads to a complicated romance that reveals their buried histories and vulnerabilities against the backdrops of an America in chaos and Mexico

Beginning in the first summer of the postObama world Zachary Lazars bewitching and masterful new novel tells the story of Christopher Bell a blocked painter on the East End of Long Island and Ana Ramirez a journalist who fled the crisis in Venezuela and is looking for work in New York Bell has always felt marked by his foreignness having emigrated to the US as a child and has come to believe that words like identity and American are somehow very meaningful and very meaningless at the same time He has retreated to a modest house near a patch of woods a rural nowherethat sometimes held more meaning for me in its silence than human language

In the woods he encounters Ana who is trying to reinvent herself as the kind of person shed been before the world she knew disappeared A complicated romance develops that gradually reveals their buried historiesfrom the death of Bells former partner Malika Jordan a fellow artist to the prison farm where he visits Malikas incarcerated brother Jesse to Mexico City where Anas exiled family now lives All of them have faced the same problem how to build a new life once the idea youve had of home vanishes or becomes unrecognizable

The Apartment on Calle Uruguay is a haunting exploration of love art and the cost of transformation It lays out a fiercely intentional and introspective way of living in an unjust world