Beautyland

To understand people the way a perceptive author like Marie-Helene Bertino does, it helps to be, at once, an active participant in and a shrewd, outside observer of human society. Adina Giorno, the heroine of Bertino’s third novel, who does eventually become a writer, is by nature both of these things. While she looks like any other Philly girl growing up in the late 20th century, Adina knows herself to be a member of an alien race, sent to report back to her true home planet (by fax machine) on the earthlings who surround her. Some of her observations are cutting: “Human beings don’t like when other humans seem happy.” Others are tender: “Death’s biggest surprise is that it does not end the conversation.” But each contributes to Bertino’s plainspoken yet profound meditation on what it means to be a person eking out a painfully brief life among 8.2 billion other souls just like—and also entirely different from—ourselves.

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Correction, November 13

The original version of this story misstated the name of the novel's protagonist. Her name is Adina Giorno, not Adele Giorno.