One of the strengths of fiction is its ability to allow readers to live as another person. We not only move with characters through their time and space, but we also sense and feel with them. We learn more about what it means to be human—widening our experience of living—by reading novels. We practice the skill of empathy. Australian writer Madeleine Ryan’s debut novel, A Room Called Earth (Penguin Books, 2020), offers a delightful and unique character for her readers, one that shocked me not by her strangeness, but by the extreme degree of relation and familiarity I felt for her. A Room Called Earth follows an unnamed autistic woman getting ready for and attending a party. The events of the book take place in twenty-four hours or less, but the richness of the unnamed protagonist’s stream of consciousness taps infinity. Her thoughts range from the social posturing of women to the injustices of Australian colonialism to her altar of crystals in her garden. She feels deeply—other people’s emotions and her own—and has extreme respect for all life forms, including her cat, Porkchop. She has an affinity for imagining possibilities, including the possible ways people may perceive her at the continue...