The narrator of Sarah Manguso’s Liars is obsessed with cleaning. As her marriage, unsteady from the start, begins to disintegrate, Jane scrubs frantically at surfaces all over her house. After her husband disappears on another mysterious ‘trip to Calgary’, Jane cleans the house ‘like a madwoman … to make a tidy place in which to feel lonely’, seeking the fresh start that she can’t have.

The novel, too, is distinctly tidy. Manguso has a crisp, staccato prose style that she has honed through experimental works such as 300 Arguments, a book of aphoristic fragments published in 2017. (She made her name with essays and poetry before turning to fiction.) She abhors extraneous description and her most eloquent passages take the form of short paragraphs separated by large spaces. In Liars, Manguso showcases her skill of whittling prose down to essential, discomfiting details. Every paragraph is put to work, chronicling the characters’ relationship, from its rosy beginnings (‘I’d ordered à la carte and gotten everything I’d wanted,’ a smitten Jane declares at the outset) to its chaotic demise and its impact on Jane’s career as a writer.

Manguso declared in a 2022 interview that writing ‘feels like an exorcism almost’. She thinks of her books as an ‘instrument for emptying myself of what I no longer need, what I no longer want to think about’. Her material is often dark. Her first book, The Two Kinds of