Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye.

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk

Why I have it: Picked a few from Cusk after I read Second Place.

Summary: In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk’s marriage of ten years came to an end. In the months that followed, life as she had known it came apart. Aftermath chronicles this perilous journey as Cusk redefines herself as a single woman.

An argument is only an emergency of self-definition, after all.

I’m thinking: Yes.

Assembly by Natasha Brown

Why I have it: Think I spotted in during last year’s Novella November.

Summary: The narrator, a black British woman, is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down, she can’t escape the question: is it time to take it all apart?

I’m thinking: Can’t say because the ‘sample’ was only the table of contents!

Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic

Why I have it: Not sure.

Summary: Alice Hare, 23yo, becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, a Japanese writer living in New York, whose life story has strange parallels to her own and whom she believes is her ‘internet twin’. What seems to Mizuko like a chance encounter with Alice is anything but—after all, in the age of connectivity, nothing is coincidence.

I’m thinking: Maybe.