When a writer offers a book to a reader, she is implicitly making an offer to that reader, and if the reader buys the book, she seals the deal. What is the deal? I call it 'the credibility contract'. I will suspend my disbelief in this fiction that you have concocted, if you persuade me that the world in which your story plays out is real. This week on the water Of course, she knows it’s not real. Every fiction is invented, the world in which the drama is staged is a construct. So it’s the...