Without grief, we would never recover from tragedy or loss. While the act of grieving may promote healing, it remains an intensely personal emotion with the power to silence and stifle us, to freeze, pacify, and exhaust us.
The characters in One Sun Only, Camille Bordas’ new story collection, struggle to communicate in the wake of traumatic loss. They want to share their pain; they want to be seen; but they also surrender to isolation and nurse their wounds in private. These characters share a basic conflict in common—the question of whether to speak or remain silent, commune or disengage. They obsess over ex-boyfriends, develop addictions to gambling and food, and brood over chess openings. All distractions, dissimulations, pretenses for pondering anything but the absence of a loved one.
Several stories first appeared in venerable literary publications like The Paris Review and The New Yorker, and Bordas’ prose is expert as we might expect. She employs a kind of cinema verite style that beckons to the reader with the messy details of daily life—perhaps even an overabundance of detail. Bordas welcomes us into the heads of her protagonists by recreating the chronic distraction and self-consciousness of the modern mind. There is something familiar and unsettling about the experience of reading such stories. They contain the transgressive thrill of the voyeur and, yes, the boredom of modern life as well.
The title story follows a father who worries about his young son’s mental health when he analyzes the boy’s casual drawings. Healthy children will draw just one sun, someone tells him, whereas traumatized children either draw too many suns or omit the sun entirely. The parents’ divorce frustrates the boy and blocks his ability to grieve for his late grandfather. Bordas uses the double meaning of sun/son to create a convincingly complex portrait of the boy, who struggles for validation and love in the proverbial shadow of his more artistically gifted older sister. I wondered if the protagonist’s anxiety over the subliminal meaning of his child’s artwork may have provided a convenient distraction from mourning the death of his own father.
In one of the stronger stories, “The Presentation on Egypt,” the author shifts deftly between the point of view of three different characters, first taking the perspective of a doctor who commits suicide, then the perspective of his teenage daughter, who struggles to sustain healthy relationships in the years after her father’s death. Her mother hides the truth of the suicide, telling her instead that it was a heart attack. For the rest of her life, the daughter fears she has inherited a weak heart.
The title of the story “Offside Constantly” refers to the narrator’s belief that, similar to learning the offside rule in soccer, learning about death causes a person to see it everywhere. The fourteen-year-old narrator suffers from narcolepsy, or an illness like it, after the death of her teenage brother. She attends doctor’s appointments with her mother and idolizes the obituary writer in her favorite magazine, even submitting her brother’s obituary for consideration, but the writer turns it down. Bordas ingeniously depicts a character who falls asleep involuntarily, in a sense playacting at death, as a subconscious way of remaining close to her lost brother. The deeper, symbolic meaning in this tale and others in One Sun Only is beautifully subtle. Bordas implies, hints, and suggests at underlying meaning without shouting it from the rooftops. I appreciated the degree of reader participation that she invited on each page.
These stories are, however, a bit busy, and it must be said that endings are not this author’s strong suit. Several stories screech to a stop at unpredictable moments, eschewing—almost defiantly—the cheap thrill of a neat ending. Conflicts are submerged and elusive. A mother dreads the misbehavior of her daughter; a young woman relies too heavily on her sister’s advice. These internal conflicts manifest as simmering discontents that never quite subside.
These characters know they need to respect themselves better, speak more honestly and directly, ditch unhealthy habits, but their neuroses get the better of them, neuroses endemic to the anxious, antagonistic, judgmental world we live in. Like us, these characters probably crave permission to imagine a friendlier, more forgiving world for once, even if books are the only places where it’s still safe for readers to strive after such a naive aspiration.
But Bordas believes there is hope; otherwise, she would not have written stories like these brimming with human frailty, vulnerability, and the delicious pain of living and carrying on after loved ones have left us behind.
Fiction
One Sun Only
By Camille Bordas
Random House
Published January 27, 2026
