The Delivery: ★★★★★

A nameless delivery boy in a nameless city, a refugee from a nameless country, fleeing a nameless Strongman, indentured to a nameless Supervisor, dispatched to nameless customers with unmarked packages, not knowing, yet, the rules of the system, and the language, in which he is trapped—a story told, though we do not know it yet, by a nameless narrator in a nameless city, a refugee from a nameless country, fleeing a nameless Strongman.

Peter Mendelsund’s 2021 novel, The Delivery, is a metafictional fable of forced migration, beginning in staccato—fragmentary updates from an e-bike courier on the go—before breaking into fluent prose, then headlong in a paragraph of run-on sentences that skids for thirty pages to a final full stop.

Each of the novel’s three Parts bears an epigraph from Wittgenstein’s Investigations, uncredited until a note at the very end. There are philosophical in-jokes, about rule-following—Wittgenstein’s “paradox” that nothing in the prior application of a rule can fix…