Lithium, by Malén Denis

Lithium was the latest installment in the New Directions book subscription my dad got me for Christmas. It arrived a couple days before I was heading out of the country for 9 days and was nice and slim, so I threw it in my backpack to take along on my trip. I'm terrible about reading when traveling, but I did start it on the train from Paris to Antwerp. I didn't get very far along before dozing off – more because of the calming motion on my early morning train than any shortcomings on the part of the book, though I will say it didn't grab me immediately. I put it away on my arrival in Antwerp and didn't get back to it until today, a week after my return home. 

I still wasn't sure how I felt about it when I went back to it, but it's such a short book I figured I should just finish it, and then as I was reading it began to grow on me. By the end, I liked it quite a bit more than I expected to.

Lithium is told largely as a second person running narrative by a narrator who is addressing her internal thoughts to her ex. He's been institutionalized under somewhat unclear circumstances, and the narrator is looking after his apartment and his family of cats (two adults, and some newborn kittens). The narrator seems to be spiraling a bit, but as we read on we learn her situation is quite a bit more complicated than it seemed at first – and also, over the course of the book, she starts to heal. I really liked the way Lithium exposed the events preceding the book.