piAnd if the world were a way out A river A door And if this was not a rhetorical questionippIn these peculiar times, we are thrust back into ourselves in a kind of suspension one in which only private life exists yet threatens to become trivial through a sense of mutual, overarching dread.ppiLent ifrom award-winning writer Kate Cayley is built from this tension, exploring domestic and artistic life amidst the environmental crisis, and the surprising ways that every philosophical quandary--large and small--converges in the home, in small objects, conversations, moments.ppGrotesque and tedious, baroque and banal intertwine in the first three sections. Meticulous depictions of spectacle run into the repetition of daily domestic life trying to explain time to children, day trips to the planetarium and strangers' warnings, intersperse depictions of Mary Shelley recalling the monster, the inner life of a Seventeenth Century portrait sitter, Ted Hughes' second wife telling her story to the d