Ruth Franklin in The New Yorker, in 2018: ‘If nothing is “not believable,” presumably all possibilities are available to the novelist. At the same time, all realist fiction, no matter how unbelievable, has to take place within the basic parameters of reality. Because the counterfactuality in [Jane] Yolen’s work exists within a context of fact, there’s no confusion about where one ends and the other begins.’

And: ‘“There is no way that fiction can come close to touching how truly inhuman, alien, even satanic, was the efficient machinery of death at the camps,” Yolen wrote in an afterword to “The Devil’s Arithmetic.” “Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory.” We may emerge from these books without grasping the true horror of their stories. But at least we’ve learned how to listen to them.’

Where can fiction come close to?