India, Aug. 27 -- American writer Sigrid Nunez's characters are forever being ambushed by things they thought they had safely put away in the recesses of their past. Memory, in her fiction, is a cluttered cupboard (and not an orderly archive) whose door keeps springing open. The National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, What Are You Going Through and The Vulnerables has always been interested in what remains after an experience has supposedly ended. A friendship may have broken down, a marriage failed or a lover disappeared, but the past refuses to stay where it has been put. It returns through an old letter, an unexpected smell or a seemingly trivial memory, persistent as an unpaid bill.

That movement gives It Will Come Back to ...