The Photograph

A woman's life is traced through a single photograph of her and her husband taken decades earlier, and the narrative moves backward and forward through their marriage, loss, and aging — a classic bildungsroman built around a central object. The tone is elegiac and melancholic as it deals with the passage of time, the death of a child, and the slow erosion of a long marriage. The romance is a central thread, and the book contains a genuine mystery element: the reader is constantly piecing together how the couple came to be together and what happened to the child in the photo, which is only fully revealed late in the book.