"The Bureau of Hearings” is a sweeping portrait of a single family, but at the same time it’s a fascinating meditation on the secrets of closeness and trust—and on the state of a general shipwreck that unites us all. The novel’s heroine falls in love, marries, has a daughter, teaches literary craft, fights cockroaches in her apartment, goes to yoga, and tries to understand that her husband has a mistress—but that’s only the surface. In truth, the most primary feeling is that everything in the world is connected: our everyday life full of little things, and the words of Keats, Kafka, Rilke; love letters stamped “Bureau of Hearings” and the desperate experience of Russian cosmonauts; tender motherly love and advice for housewives from 1896. Jenny Offill writes with cool precision, in a language that glitters with rage, wit, and savage longing. She managed to create an exquisitely gripping story about the transience of things and their slipping beauty.