Lark

Locked in a secret annex, deprived of her treasured Russian writers, her dignity under siege by lumpy mattresses and day-old baked ziti, Lark is starting to feel like the Underground Man. As she sneaks her way around so-called sympathisers and attempts to recruit an accomplice (oh, for a literate one), Lark plots her escape, thinks fondly about life before it was illegal to grow old, and neurotically searches for lost objects and connections. Acidly amusing, immeasurably eccentric, oddball, sidelong, and undeniably smart, Lark is a novel besotted with coffee, with Chekhov, and the New York of Wilkinson’s own childhood: the city where a sharp mind — and a good coat from Bergdorf’s — are still all you really need to survive.