Borrowed Certainty

A family dinner overlooking Puget Sound becomes the setting for a quiet novel about the formation of belief. As conversations move between rooms, different assumptions and versions of events gather force through familiar language, repeated ideas, and the attention people give one another.

Lisa J. Scott follows the subtle movement from perception to certainty over the course of a single evening. Without relying on dramatic events, the story examines inherited belief and the ways familiarity can feel like evidence, revealing more of its social patterns as attention slows.