8 empowering books about living through loss

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Reading lists

Imagine Me Gone

Shortlisted for the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2017 
2017 PULITZER PRIZE Finalist for Fiction 
TIME Top Ten Novels of 2016 
 
'It might be the best American novel about a middle-class family since Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections' Independent 
 
'Exceptional, haunting, distinctive... [It] resembles the work of Anne Tyler, intertwining grief and love... Intimate and panoramic' The Sunday Times 
 
'Dreadfully sad and hilariously funny. Literature of the highest order' Peter Carey 
 
Universal and essential, the heart-breaking story of an ordinary American family shaped by tragedy 
 
Michael's father walked into the woods one day, and out of his family's life for ever. Yet he and his brother and sister see it less as a tragedy in their past and more as a forewarning of the future. For Michael - smart, brilliant, so alive and vital - feels the darkness that drew their father away and how, given the chance, it might take the whole family. He wants to save them - but can he save himself?

Beautiful, elegant, harrowing... This is a book that makes you eager, once more, for the complications of the world

This beautiful, tragic novel will haunt you for the rest of your life... Michael is simply one of the finest characters I've ever come across... An extraordinary work of art

Marvellously lucid and intelligent... [a] novel about family, love, and a despair that proves unbearable

Imagine Me Gone is beautiful, it's terrifying, it's intimate and epic, and it's devastating - one of the great books about loss and mourning and the ineluctable laws that govern families. I cannot describe the force or the depth of its accomplishment except to say that this magnificent work of art has overwhelmed me and broken my heart. It will take me a long time to come to terms with this novel.

Universal and essential. A book that you do not read as much as feel, deeply in the very marrow of your bones

There are some books, and this is one, that grab you in the first paragraphs and don't let go. A beautiful novel that re-evaluates how we cope with tragedy

Brilliantly captures the excruciating burden of love

Dark and winning humour, poignant tenderness, and sentences so astute that they lift the spirit. But make no mistake, the novel's most rewarding surprise is its heart

Michael is a bright kid: funny, likable, obsessed with books and music. His sister Celia is the practical one, sensible, far tougher than her brothers. And then there's Alec, the most ambitious of the three but also the most sensitive, growing up in the shadow of his older siblings. The children are still living at home when their father walks into the woods alone one day and takes his own life. Years later, one of them will follow him. 
 
Weaving together the voices of five family members, Adam Haslett imagines how a single tragedy can define many lives.

You Are Not A Stranger Here?

'Enormously moving - Haslett's writing is harrowing, morbidly funny and deeply erotic' Independent on Sunday

Adam Haslett is a wonderful rarity. You're likely not only to love his stories but to feel stronger for having read them

Jonathan Franzen, author of 'The Corrections'

Adam Haslett possesses the rare ability to combine powerful narrative with sensitive and perceptive observations of people and places. You Are Not a Stranger Here is a brilliant beginning to a literary career

Adam Haslett's tone is one of delicate, understated heartache... He never lets the reader forget that he is shining an unflinching light on those types of human suffering that cannot be cured, only endured

Enormously moving... Haslett's writing is harrowing, morbidly funny and deeply erotic

Adam Haslett arrives from out of nowhere sounding like a master

Adam Haslett is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Yale Law School. His first book, You Are Not a Stranger Here, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and won the L. Winship/PEN New England Award. He is also the winner of a Michener Fellowship. He lives in New York City.

In one of the most acclaimed fiction debuts in years, Adam Haslett explores the lives that appear shuttered by loss and discovers entire worlds hidden inside them. An ageing inventor, burning with manic creativity, tries to reconcile with his estranged gay son. An orphaned boy draws a thuggish classmate into a relationship of escalating guilt and violence. A genteel middle-aged woman, a long-time resident of a rest home, becomes the confidante of a lovelorn, teenage volunteer. With Checkovian restraint and compassion, conveying both the sorrow of life and the courage with which people rise to meet it, You Are Not A Stranger Here is a triumph.

Adam Haslett

A complex portrait of parallel lives on a par with the great Russian novels . . . incandescently smart and elegant . . . This is a story that feels as deep and real as life itself – a beautiful portrait of a mother and son

The novel I’ve looked forward to most this coming year: Adam Haslett’s Mothers and Sons . . . I’ve loved his writing since Union Atlantic and this book is his best yet . . . The echoes of the Russian greats in the title aren’t misplaced – this is an epic family saga that packs an extraordinary emotional punch

Observer, ‘Fiction to look out for in 2025’

A rising American superstar . . . Mothers and Sons packs a powerful punch which will secure [Haslett's] reputation . . . What Haslett does especially well is excavate the emotional inner lives of his characters . . . The final third of the book has the pace and revelation of a thriller. Ann may believe that “history is a mess” but Haslett shows quite brilliantly how the past can deliver blows decades on, and that sometimes a step backwards is what it takes to be properly in the present

Subtle, symphonic and satisfying . . . the secrets are deep and rich . . . Haslett wears his novelists skills lightly, never overwhelming the reader with a forceful style, but dropping in distinctive observations nonetheless

Riveting . . . Unfurling across multiple timelines with impressive, confident fluidity, Mothers and Sons is a powerful study of the impossibility of trying to hold back the tides of familial hurt and trauma. When the levee finally breaks, the outcome is both heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful

Mothers and Sons is Haslett’s best novel . . . he achieves new levels of moral depth and narrative push

One of the most psychologically astute fiction writers in America . . . Mothers and Sons could not be more timely . . .There’s a strange tension in Haslett’s work between urgency and introspection. Try as you might, you cannot rush this novel . . . His prose lies on the page with the intensity of a loosely coiled copperhead; you don’t even see the camouflaged danger until it strikes. He’s a master of incident and particularly of the ordinary line that’s transformed by his pacing and placement into something altogether devastating

There’s no better writer at chronicling the highs and lows of familial love. In Mothers and Sons, Haslett shows a family both torn by past trauma and battered by the social turmoil of the present . . . The chronicle of this complex mother and son pair satisfies one of the best reasons to read fiction: to understand others and their impossible burdens, to mourn when they stumble and celebrate when they survive

This beautifully written novel about the power of stories to redeem the past and reclaim the future is itself a tapestry of such narratives

Excellent . . . Haslett sets up this story with a delicacy that will not surprise anyone who read his beautiful 2016 novel, Imagine Me Gone, which featured a fretful, caretaking mother and her manic-depressive son. He is particularly good at depicting the ways—often admirable, sometimes blinding—that both Ann and Peter have been shaped by their work

Haslett’s storytelling skill . . . is on quietly magnificent display . . . As much as both mother and son understand about the power of stories to harm and heal, they’ve failed to reckon with their own story, and the guilt and shame each has been carrying for decades. The momentum of the novel builds as long-held misunderstandings and resentments come to the surface, illuminating the meaning of what it means to be a mother, and a son, and culminating with a great sense of a weight lifted, of lightness and air

Mothers and Sons has a simple brilliance and charm, a subtle pull to delve deeper into the lives of [its] fraught characters and uncover the narratives we tell ourselves versus the truth. These are good people living ordinary lives, and it’s a pleasure to read about them

Mothers and Sons is both moving and deeply compelling, a story about the search for our own humanity, and the lengths we will go to maintain it. A new book by Adam Haslett is always cause for celebration. He is one of our very best writers

Mothers and Sons is like sonar in a lake, pinging out everything submerged, the hidden stories, shames and joys. There’s nothing like it. Haslett’s characters feel so real, their choices so hard, their lives so true. He is everything you want in a writer

A family-in-crisis story that keenly captures deep-seated fears and regrets . . . Haslett’s sophisticated grasp of the ways that people over-police their feelings makes it a remarkably acute and effective character study . . . The strength of Haslett’s storytelling is its deliberation, slowly peeling back the veneers of Peter's and Ann’s professional accomplishments and cool public personas to reveal storms of guilt and fear

Well-paced and elegantly written, Haslett’s latest is a haunting work

Haslett is skilled at examining the interior lives of characters in states of emotional extremis, whether they’re dealing with anxiety, depression, loneliness, or mental illness, or facing homophobia or violence . . . His ability to capture what it means to be human, in all its beauty, mundaneness, and ugliness, is what makes Haslett a standout

At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of immigrants only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter's numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him. 
 
Ann, his mother, who runs a women's retreat centre she founded after leaving his father, is wounded by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built. She long ago banished from her mind the decision that divided her from her son. But as Peter’s case plunges him further into the fraught memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life forever, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart. 
 
With unsurpassed emotional depth, Mothers and Sons reveals all that is lost by looking away from the past and the love that might be restored by facing it. In his spellbinding new novel, Adam Haslett demonstrates yet again his mastery of “a rich assortment of literary gifts” (New York Times).

Adam Haslett

Praise for Mothers and Sons

A complex portrait of parallel lives on a par with the great Russian novels . . . incandescently smart and elegant . . . This is a story that feels as deep and real as life itself – a beautiful portrait of a mother ...

The novel I’ve looked forward to most this coming year: Adam Haslett’s Mothers and Sons . . . I’ve loved his writing since Union Atlantic and this book is his best yet . . . The echoes of the Russian g ...

A rising American superstar . . . Mothers and Sons packs a powerful punch which will secure [Haslett's] reputation . . . What Haslett does especially well is excavate the emotional inner lives of his characte ...

A complex portrait of parallel lives on a par with the great Russian novels . . . incandescently smart and elegant . . . This is a story that feels as deep and real as life itself – a beautiful portrait of a mother ...

The novel I’ve looked forward to most this coming year: Adam Haslett’s Mothers and Sons . . . I’ve loved his writing since Union Atlantic and this book is his best yet . . . The echoes of the Russian g ...

A rising American superstar . . . Mothers and Sons packs a powerful punch which will secure [Haslett's] reputation . . . What Haslett does especially well is excavate the emotional inner lives of his characte ...

A complex portrait of parallel lives on a par with the great Russian novels . . . incandescently smart and elegant . . . This is a story that feels as deep and real as life itself – a beautiful portrait of a mother ...

The novel I’ve looked forward to most this coming year: Adam Haslett’s Mothers and Sons . . . I’ve loved his writing since Union Atlantic and this book is his best yet . . . The echoes of the Russian g ...

A rising American superstar . . . Mothers and Sons packs a powerful punch which will secure [Haslett's] reputation . . . What Haslett does especially well is excavate the emotional inner lives of his characte ...

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8 empowering books about living through loss

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