The Anxiety of Everyday Objects (2004)

Sheehan is an exquisite writer who sums up characters' quirks with a mere turn of phrase. There's our heroine, Winona Bartlett, a secretary who feels the ''chaos of loneliness''; there's Winona's coworker Nancy, whose personality, ''half-administrative and half-professional...made her crazy; it was the curse of the ill defined''; and there's the overworked lawyer ''rushing about on winged wingtips.'' The author, a short-story veteran, isn't quite successful with the long form. ''Anxiety'''s plot -- about a backstabbing attorney and a pining suitor -- feels anemic compared with the lushness of Sheehan's writing.