Elizabeth McCracken is the award-winning author of eight books, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry, The Giant's House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imag-ination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award), The Souvenir Museum and The Hero of This Book. She has received grants and fellow-ships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and she was chosen as one of Granta's 20 Best American Writers Under 40. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fic-tion at the University of Texas at Austin.
Into a single, most singular novel, McCracken fits everything we adult daughters know and feel and love and fear about our beautiful, complicated mothers, and could never say. A sublime gift. What could be better value than a book set over one day that you can read in one day, but that will stay in your heart and refuse to go? ... One of the greatest memoirs of a parent. * The Times * Easily one of the best novels (or is it actually a memoir?) that will be published this year ... it is touching and funny, and full of sharp-eyed observations about family life and parents and how your childhood forms you. * The Times * Confirms McCracken as among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life. Like Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett, she combines a blistering intelligence with deep humanity... an extraordinarily vivid portrait of an extraordinary - and much beloved - mother. * Guardian * Her words create an exquisite alchemy that makes a reader ready to follow her anywhere, believe every word she writes down... With every vital, potent sentence, McCracken conveys the electric and primal nature of that first fundamental love. * New York Times *