On 'The Palm House'

In The Palm House, Gwendoline Riley takes a page from Dickens—specifically, the first page of Bleak House—and immediately drops us in a London cloaked in strange fog, gloomy vapors scudding over the Thames, the streetlamps clicking on early. Here, though, it’s technically not fog, but sand, from when 2017’s Hurricane Ophelia whipped North African dust and smoke northward, casting the London skies an eerie yellow, “like iodine.” Amid this dystopian pea-souper, Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam wet their worries at a pub on the South Bank. Putnam informs Laura, the narrator, that the haze is “Saharan sand” that’s “deflecting the shortwave light.” She replies that she hadn’t noticed it. “ ‘Well, it’s a storm now,’ said Putnam. ‘Was a storm.’ ”