You Think It, I’ll Say It

Ten stories about people quietly judging one another and being wrong. Sittenfeld’s characters are recognisably middle-class Americans navigating status, envy and self-deception: a mother who thinks she has a celebrity’s number, a man at a reunion, a woman certain she has read a stranger correctly. The satisfaction is structural, since each story turns on the gap between what someone assumes and what is actually true, and Sittenfeld closes that gap with unusual precision.