Without any Proof

Without Any Proof — Glenn HarrowBrooklyn, autumn. A theater, a spilled beer, a woman behind a book table. That's how everything between Hank and Beth begins — and that's how it stays: close enough to touch, far enough to miss each other.Glenn Harrow, author of the acclaimed psychological novel The Delilah Principle, returns with Without Any Proof to the New York he knows like no one else: loud on the surface, unsettlingly quiet underneath. Hank works as a prop master at the Belasco Theatre in Midtown Manhattan. He is calm, precise, reliable — a man who puts things in their proper place and leaves them there. Beth runs a small bookstore in Carroll Gardens, raising her son Paul on her own, with her mother Nannie, and mistrusts anything that fits too well. What develops between them has no name and no words.Without Any Proof is not a novel about grand gestures. It is a novel about the small, dangerous moments in between. About a man who doesn't know how to truly let someone in. About a woman who has learned that men leave — and who therefore tests before she believes. About a child who sees the truth before the adults can speak it. And about a question that runs through every sentence: Can you trust someone without having the words for the fact that he stays?Harrow writes with the precision of a surgeon and the patience of someone who knows that the real fractures are never loud. Lisbon, Brooklyn, Savannah — the settings are as alive as the figures who move through them and miss each other. Anyone who loves novels that don't explain but show. That whisper instead of shout. That stay in the body for days after the last page — should read Without Any Proof. For everyone who knows that the most dangerous moments in a relationship are never loud.