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In Kate Briggs’s The Long Form, Helen, a young mother, is awake with her baby. Together they move through a morning routine that is in one sense entirely ordinary—resting, feeding, pacing. Yet in the closeness of their rented flat, such everyday acts take on epic scope, thoughts and objects made newly alive in the light of their shared attention. Then the rhythm of their morning is interrupted: a delivery person arrives with a used copy of Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, which Helen has ordered online. She begins to read, and attention shifts. As their day unfolds, the intimate space Helen shares with her baby becomes entwined with Fielding’s novel, with other books and ideas, and with questions about class and privilege, housing and caregiving, and the support structures that underlie durational forms of codependency, both social and artistic.

The story of two people composing a day together, The Long Form also renews Fielding’s proposition for what a novel can be: a province of writing that gathers both fiction and essay, that looks to past traditions while supporting new life.