The World’s Smallest Bible

Jeremiah and Ethan are brothers trying to make sense of their world, a world where their father womanizes and their mother hides behind stories, a world where the neighbor aspires to build a perpetual motion machine and challenges gravity, a world where a dead friend haunts them and the cracks in their ceiling become great rivers. As Jeremiah and Ethan grow up, grow apart, and follow different paths, the common language of their childhood brings them back together.

There’s something quite elusive about The World’s Smallest Bible; every sentence, every image, has two meanings, one for each brother. It transfers a curious dreamlike state to the entire novel, as if the stories the boys conjure in their youth could come to life at any given moment, and it wouldn’t seem out of place. (Indeed, the power of stories is a recurring thread in the book, both the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves.)

Beyond the language, which alternates between lyrically inviting and disconcertingly stilted, the narrative of how brothers fight and support each other rings utterly true, even in those moments where the book itself threatens to alienate the reader.