Amanda Lohrey’s Capture plays out as a sequence of conversations in strange rooms.
The centre of the novel is the consulting room of psychiatrist James Mather, lately stripped of all its therapeutic paintings and suggestive curios to a state of clinical blankness. There is also the apartment where the psychiatrist and his former lover regard each other from “two enormous couches in the centre of the room”. And there are the rooms of a shiatsu sensei, cavernous and empty, except for a “big glass aquarium of shimmering fish”.
