Blueberries is a collection of ‘essays concerning understanding’ that explores multiple styles from academic to short story to memoir. It kicks off with Yellow City, which tells the story of a woman who revisits Lisbon a decade after a serious sexual assault to attempt to find out what happened to her perpetrators after she left the country. The tension Savage builds between the mundanity of trying to get hold of the paperwork and the trauma of her assault is really gripping, showing the powerlessness of sexual assault survivors when legal systems take their stories and make them a property of the state. Unfortunately, there was a slump around the middle of the collection where I wasn’t nearly as engaged, though it picks back up later: Houses looks at our relationship with our ‘homes’ against the instability of renting, and Portrait of the Writer as a Worker had some observations about being a creative that really connected with me. MG

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