The most powerful fiction I read this year (and in a very long time), Bluets felt more like an extended lyric poem than an actual book. Nelson confesses, at the beginning of the book, that the goal of the work is to be a compendium of the color blue: her result, if not quite that, is a discourse on hope and hopelessness, the sense of being filled and the sense of being emptied. It is an utterly unique work of art.

★★★★★

Highlights

I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.”

All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”