Tell is structured as a series of interviews with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has mysteriously disappeared, and may or may not have committed suicide.
A slow-burn literary take on the missing-person whydunit ... Always well crafted, this novel is engaging in parts and digressive in others, which adds to its realism ... The buildup in Tell is perpetual, a sense that an explanation must be coming. But the author diverges from expectations and converges on reality, where remembering is not the same as understanding.
The interview conceit in Tell makes it feel fresh, the withholding of interiority requiring an unusual engagement. Don’t take the conversational prose at face value; underneath it lies a whole other set of mysteries besides Curtis’s.
[The book] is interested in stories and how we tell them, and in how a life is almost always too complex to be reduced to a neat narrative framing ... A rich and satisfying portrait of the wider Doyle family ecosystem and a fascinating exploration of what it means to tell stories about our lives.
