In her expansive and inventive new book, Hunt uses her father’s incomplete manuscript as a vessel to communicate with him 20 years after his death.

Here the yearning of a daughter eager to understand her father in his absence resonates. How well can one possibly know the dead—or the living, for that matter? Hunt circles this question with growing intensity as she draws lines between her mother’s overstuffed house, her father’s alcoholism and her own relationship to art. In an especially wide-ranging essay, she writes about the love of One Direction that she shares with her daughters, and pieces together literary criticism and personal history relating to Patti Smith, Borges, motherhood and a surgery to remove one of her ovaries..

It’s a characteristically wild effort that defies genre distinctions, flits from the profound to the mundane with fierce intelligence and searching restlessness, and at its best, delves deep into the recesses of the human heart with courageous abandon.

Her father’s unfinished novel is satisfyingly rife with spies, international intrigue, and supernatural occurrences. The idea that these may be inventions of Samantha Hunt, the elder Hunt, or 'actual' occurrences that took place in our shared reality is similarly satisfying, deputizing the reader as a fellow detective and elevating this mystery story to a meta-level.

Make no mistake: The Unwritten Book is a downer. At times, it’s a major one.

Everywhere she looks—and she's looking hard—she finds evidence of the ways we blinker ourselves to the inevitable. Practically everything she encounters feels death-stalked to her. But that's not to suggest that the book is morbid. The pages of her father's book are annotated with lively ruminations, memories and critical readings. One section remarkably weaves the fandom she shares with her daughters for the boy band One Direction with an ovarian-cancer scare. In the process, she inverts conventional tropes about motherhood and domesticity.

For many, this excursive narrative will be underwhelming, frustrating, or confusing. Or all three.

... the moment this book begins to settle comfortably onto one path, it suddenly veers off in a completely different direction.

Hunt plumbs the depths of human experience in this assemblage of reflections on life’s sweet mystery.

... stirring.