Fatty: A Diary of Starting Over, by Sakalė, is a sprawling diary novel about a woman who leaves her former life in the capital and settles in a small seaside town, where she works at an underfunded museum and tries to begin again. Her days are filled with unreliable furniture, a wood-burning stove, eccentric visitors, municipal bureaucracy, local gossip, and a colleague named Diana who treats matchmaking as a community responsibility. What begins as a record of supposedly uneventful days gradually becomes a lively account of belonging, loneliness, work, friendship, and the strange routes people take toward a new life.

The narrator’s voice is the book’s strongest feature. She’s observant, self-critical, imaginative, and very funny, especially when her carefully reasoned plans collapse into public embarrassment. Her interests in vintage objects, forgotten local stories, museums, books, and old films give the novel a distinct personality. The book also makes good use of its small-town setting. Minor characters keep returning, rumors travel faster than official information, and everyday misunderstandings grow into community events. Even the museum’s administrative problems become entertaining because the narrator approaches them with a mixture of professional competence and mounting disbelief.

Beneath the comedy, the novel has a tender emotional center. The narrator is recovering from professional burnout, social isolation, family grief, and the feeling that her most meaningful years might already be behind her. Her adventures with a secret fat suit and a scooter are absurd, but they also let her move through the town without the expectations attached to her usual identity. As she becomes involved with teenagers, firefighters, dancers, amateur historians, and various local outsiders, she starts participating in life instead of watching it from a distance. The slow romantic storyline works for the same reason. It grows through awkward conversations, mistaken signals, practical acts of care, and two people who find speaking honestly much harder than facing an emergency.

At nearly six months of diary entries, Fatty asks readers to settle into the narrator’s routines and enjoy accumulation. Its intentionally unconventional English adds to the sense that someone is speaking directly and without much filtering, though some readers may need time to adjust to its rhythms and repeated phrases. I’d recommend it most to readers who enjoy character-driven stories, eccentric small communities, dry self-deprecating humor, slow-burn romance, and novels about women rebuilding their lives on their own terms. It’ll also appeal to anyone who likes diaries that turn ordinary workdays, local history, and social mishaps into something warm, peculiar, and unexpectedly moving.

Pages: 547 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0H4VXFL35