A San Francisco Chronicle and NPR Best Book of the Year
The author of the acclaimed memoir The Suicide Index
returns with a virtuosic collection of stories, each a stirring parable
of the power of love and the impossibility of understanding it.
Spanning centuries and continents, from eighteenth-century Vienna to
contemporary America, Joan Wickersham shows, with uncanny exactitude,
how we never really know what's in someone else's heart--or in our own.

Review :

Best Books of 2012, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews
Wise
and courageous and often brilliant... breaks new ground in our
perceptions of what a short story can be. Wonderfully imaginative and
original. - Boston Globe
An
ode to heartbreak and regret... Wickersham's gift is for capturing the
habits of mind that lead even smart people to deceive themselves... her
book makes you slow down and listen, and then watch for people to reveal
themselves. - New York Times Book Review
Elegantly structured, emotionally compelling... Short stories don't get much better than this. - Kirkus Reviews
Do
not mistake Wickersham's exquisitely polished prose for good manners.
Although she writes with a vintage grace... she is brutal and funny
too... Divine. - San Francisco Chronicle
Virtuosic... Wickersham
[takes an] emotional cannonball into every single one of her
characters. The doubts and tenderness they share are ones that only the
finest fiction can create. - Oprah.com Book of the Week
Wickersham
makes a triumphant return to fiction... articulates subtleties of human
behavior that ordinarily elude language altogether. - Elle
Munro's and Wickersham's books are at the top of this year's pile. - Chicago Tribune
So moving it will close your throat. - LA Times
The prose is beautiful, and you feel those characters like real people. - Cheryl Strayed
A master of the written word and storytelling in all its forms. - BookPage
Joan Wickersham has done it again: astonished, enchanted, and moved me. - Julia Glass
Gorgeous, completely original... As soon as I finished it, I began to read it again. - Andre Gregory
As skilled as Alice Munro in maneuvering her characters, and the reader, through time... Highly recommended. - Library Journal

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• Literature & FictionLiterary FictionRomance
• Literature & FictionContemporary FictionLiterary
• Literature & FictionShort StoriesSingle Authors

• Publication Date: October 9, 2012
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 226 Pages
• File Size: 23 KB