Rest and Be Thankful

August 15, 2020
A London pediatric nurse struggles not to let her job consume her. Laura is trying to make it through a week of night shifts at the hospital children's ward. She has time off coming up, if she can just fight her way through the exhaustion to get there. But as the novel begins, Laura's world is falling apart. The man she lives with--addressed throughout in the second person--has become standoffish and irritable; the fact that they work opposite shifts doesn't help the drift between them. At work, a baby's health worsens rapidly, and Laura has to navigate the minefield of patients, their families, the doctors and other nurses she works with, and a cluelessly cheerful med student. She is beset by poor sleep and haunted by nightmares. Worst of all, she is seeing things: a woman in black like the specter of death itself, appearing in the Tube, the hospital, and in Laura's dreams. As things continue to deteriorate, Laura is less and less sure that her nightmare, waking or otherwise, will ever end. Readers familiar with Glass' debut novel, Peach (2018), will recognize her inimitable style here: elliptical and lyric with an intense interiority. Glass wants readers inside Laura's body, tasting seawater in her nightmares of drowning, feeling her limb-heaviness as she falls asleep at a friend's kitchen table. Such richness makes all of Glass' writing stand out, but this glimpse into the world of nursing feels like a true literary rarity. Glass, a nurse herself, takes both standard nursing tropes and revelations about the work and brings them all to shimmering life. "We are cotton buds sucking up the sadness of others," Laura says of nurses, "we are saturated, we are saviors." A heart-wrenching and poetic look at a profession that deserves more literary attention.

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August 24, 2020
Glass (Peach) delivers a slim, dreamy sophomore novel about a sleep-deprived nurse. While working night shifts in a neonatal ward in London, Laura and her colleagues swaddle infants, care for them in their first moments of life, and watch as sick babies die from incurable ailments. When Laura is not working in the ward, she is at home with her partner, a man who seems to not love her or want her near (“The television is blaring. You are drowning out the world with loud sounds and whisky,” Laura narrates in a second-person passage addressed to him). In semi-waking moments, Laura begins seeing a haunting figure from her dreams: “in the pitch black her face shines sickly white, picked out by a shard of moonlight.” When Laura starts seeing the figure in the hospital whenever a death occurs on the ward, she worries she is going mad. Glass’s prose perfectly elicits the restless waking torment that drapes over Laura. The novel is visceral, and readers will keep turning the pages in fascinated dread. Agent: Niki Chang, The Good Literary Agency.

November 1, 2020
This second novel from Glass, a writer and nurse, explores trauma as poetically, inventively, and incisively as her debut, Peach (2018), this time from the perspective of pediatric nurse Laura. At the hospital, an infant patient is dying; meanwhile, home offers no solace as Laura's relationship falls apart. Laura is seeing ghostly presences in her waking life and dreaming of drowning during tortured sleep, but to her patients and their beleaguered families, she is sturdy and deft, standing by to support them in the event of ""the full collapse."" Glass' image-laden, stream-of-consciousness writing style makes for arresting moments. Laura and her colleagues are ""cotton buds sucking up the sadness of others, we are saturated, we are saviours."" The mother of a young chemo patient ""has stored up her anxieties of the day and gifts them to me, unwraps them for me, lays them across my shoulders."" Across her emotionally tender, titled chapters, Glass grants readers access to the many-dimensional Laura, so strong but struggling to care for herself as unreservedly as she cares for others.

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