The Inventory: A Novel

The key worked, which was the first surprise. The second was the smell of coffee.

A man arrives in a foreign city with one suitcase and the keys to a furnished apartment he has rented for six months, sight unseen. The apartment is not empty. There is a coat on the hook. Food in the refrigerator. A bed that has been made by somebody who makes their bed. And on the kitchen table, a cup with cold coffee still in it, a folded newspaper, and a pen lying two inches from its cap.

The agency will say only that the previous tenant's belongings "will be removed."

He should go to a hotel. Instead he stays, and the next morning, instead of packing a stranger's life into boxes, he does something he cannot explain to himself: he opens a notebook and begins to write it all down. Eight plates. Five mugs, no two the same. Nine books about sailing, from the same few years, and then nothing. Eleven records of no music at all. A man's coat, dry-cleaned nine years ago, hanging in the middle of the wardrobe where you would have to move it aside every single day.

By the time he learns who she is, and where she has been for eleven days, he has a notebook full of somebody else's life and a storage unit four hundred kilometres away that he has been paying for without once opening the door.

THE INVENTORY is a quiet, unsparing novel about the objects we cannot decide about, the arithmetic of living alone, and what it costs to be the only person who knows what is in your own apartment. It is about a woman who circled rooms to rent in the newspaper for eleven years and never telephoned a single number, an old neighbour who says the true thing at the table, a man behind a café counter who asks which floor, and two people who discover that the difference between noticing someone and knowing them is a question asked out loud, badly, at the wrong moment.

For readers of Elizabeth Strout, Claire Keegan, and Fredrik Backman.