ApartFrom by Constance A Dunn

This short novella is a reflection of life, relationships, guilt and repercussions. I’m sure that it is far more too, and I can guarantee that I was missing most of it.

The general premise is a simple one. Three people, seemingly unconnected, go about their daily lives in three different cities. The reader visits only one protagonist at a time, their stories never intertwining and always coming to a close before the next character is seen. Do they have anything in common? They are all loners, chewing on their past and on relationships which didn’t end well. They’re all living away from their homelands - out of place and running away from overbearing guilt and regret. Each comes across an enigmatic stranger who appears out of place and harbouring some hefty secrets.

The stories themselves are relatively uneventful. Their beauty lies rather in the author’s poetic turn of phrase and the many layers of meaning which the reader is able to decipher from it. I really felt that it was over to me how much I chose to read into it, so it’s possible that different readers will gain quite different messages from the same book, which is an interesting idea in itself. The version which I read still has the odd typo, but these were few and far between.

A little about Constance A Dunn:

Born on the US west coast, writing from Belgrade Serbia. Constance's non-fiction is all over the web where she writes for magazines, sites, and think tanks about travel, being foreign, and the soul of cities.
Her literary fiction dives deep into these same themes: the other, the stranger, and the foreigner.

Her debut novel ApartFrom was published in October 2013 with KUBOA press.

Where to find her on the web: http://www.constanceadunn.com/

Link to the book on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18694069-apartfrom?from_search=true