PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
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. -- Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss 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 * 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. * Guardian * 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 * A more loving and moving tribute to its subject is hard to imagine. * Guardian * One of my favorite contemporary novelists... The Hero of This Book is funny, it’s sharp, the sentences are beautiful. -- Emma Straub, author of All Adults Here 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 * The question of what this work is - a novel or a memoir, a fiction or a fact - can’t be answered. Doesn’t matter. The Hero of This Book is tender, funny, heartbreaking, philosophical. Elizabeth McCracken is a writer who always delights, and this is an exhilarating book. -- Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind This story is a tribute to how great writing can elevate any subject. * Sunday Times, *Summer Reads of 2023* * How reassuring it is to have writers like Elizabeth McCracken among us... One of those fleet-footed writers who will never be trapped, or even reliably tracked, by aboutness... Her speciality is the interior, and the interior is vast. We must bring our own compasses, emotional and aesthetic. -- Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose
