Benjamin Markovits’s most recent novel, You Don’t Have to Live Like This (HarperCollins, 2015), won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2015. He lives in London.
It’s about a half-hour train ride to Yonkers, much of it along the river. You come out of the city, off the island, and countryside appears—green strips of landscape, woody bluffs, brown water, telephone lines.