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Books to read to learn more about the AIDS crisis

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What to read after watching It’s A Sin

The Borrower

A sparkling debut novel about the stories we read and the ones we tell ourselves

The heightening tension throughout their haphazard road trip from Missouri to Vermont is exhilarating... This astonishingly assured novel knows precisely where it's heading ... the reader is breathless with hope that Lucy and Ian will find a happy ending.

A tale of the inspirational power of children's books...The Borrower is a tremendously entertaining read.

The Borrower's out and out charm is heightened by its furious, righteous heart and conviction that books offer salvation and hope when life is messy and near-unbearable

Funny, charming debut...it's a lovely, inventive novel, smart but not annoyingly wise-cracking, about the power of books and stories to sustain people when life becomes impossible... warmly demonstrates that love can come in different and unexpected guises.

The sheer zest and care with which this book is written, as well as the emphasis on children's literature, set it apart... Makkai is an engaging writer.

Rarely is a first novel as smart and engaging and learned and funny and moving as The Borrower.

Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize–winning and bestselling author of That Old Cape Magic and Empire Falls

Makkai takes several risks in her sharp, often witty text, replete with echoes of children's classics from Goodnight Moon to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as well as more ominous references to Lolita...the moving final chapters affirm the power of books to change people's lives even as they acknowledge the unbreakable bonds of home and family. Smart, literate and refreshingly unsentimental.

Rebecca Makkai takes all the best features of the children's books her characters love and sweeps them straight into her first novel: their warmth, their vibrancy, their joy at setting their inventions in motion and following them wherever they might lead. She is a generous, original, and arresting writer, and any story she wants to tell, I want to listen.

She's a great writer...a wonderfully entertaining story packed with moral conundrums and beautiful writing

Ian is a little star. His many sayings and observations that he'll burst out with are endearing - and often funny. It's clear that Lucy is smitten by her favourite 'borrower.'

This story - often fun, sometimes sad, always bookish - deals with big issues...Rebecca Makkai's literary debut will appeal to young adults and readers of adult literary fiction

In Makkai's picaresque first novel, Lucy, a 26-year-old children's librarian, "borrows" her favorite patron, bright, book-loving 10-year-old Ian, after his fundamentalist parents enroll him in a program meant to "cure" his nascent homosexuality.

Rebecca Makkai’s stories have been anthologised in the Best American Short Stories 2010, 2009, and 2008, and have appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, and on Public Radio's Selected Shorts. The Borrower is her first novel. She lives north of Chicago with her husband and two daughters. 
 
For more information visit Rebecca’s website: www.rebeccamakkai.com

Lucy Hull, a young children’s librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both kidnapper and kidnapped when her favourite patron, ten-year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading, but needs Lucy’s help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly anti-gay classes. When Lucy finds Ian camped out in the library after hours with a backpack of provisions and an escape plan, she allows herself to be hijacked by him and the pair embark on a spontaneous road trip. But is it just Ian who is running away? And should Lucy really be trying to save a boy from his own parents?

Rebecca Makkai

Makkai’s second novel defies genre – part literary mystery, part comedy of manners, part wickedly funny satire. Whichever way you look at it, it’s remarkable.

Rebecca Makkai is a writer to watch, as sneakily ambitious as she is unpretentious.

Makkai humorously turns the conventional family saga on its head, in a clever exploration of metamorphosis and secrecy.

Makkai has written a novel that reads almost like early Muriel Spark – clever, competent, and concealing an unsettling and skewed reality ... The hand that keeps giving the kaleidoscope another turn, controlling just how the pieces land, isn't fate, of course. It's the artist, Makkai is one.

A big-hearted gothic novel, an intergenerational mystery, a story of heartbreak and a romance, all crammed into one grand Midwestern estate ... A juicy and moving story of art and love and the luck it takes for either to last.

An entertaining, ambitious saga ... Makkai's lyrical prose quietly lifts off the page while her carefully crafted plot charges forward.

This novel is stunning: ambitious, readable, and intriguing. Its gothic elements, complexity, and plot twists are reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. Chilling and thoroughly enjoyable ... A daring takeoff from her entertaining debut.

Makkai’s second novel is a lively and clever story starring an estate with an intricate history . . . The book is exceptionally well constructed, with engaging characters busy reinventing themselves throughout, and delightful twists that surprise and satisfy

Charmingly clever and mischievously funny, Makkai follows her enthusiastically praised first novel, The Borrower (2011), with an intriguingly structured tale — each section takes a step back in time — set on a fabled, possibly haunted estate north of Chicago ... Her offbeat characters and suspenseful story could have added up to a stylish romp. Instead, Makkai offers that and much more as she stealthily investigates the complexities of ambition, sexism, violence, creativity, and love in this diverting yet richly dimensional novel.

Makkai fulfills the promise of her debut with this witty and darkly acerbic novel set in the rich soils of an artists' colony. The inverted timeline of the multi-generational narrative deepens the layered mysteries at its heart. As decades unfold in reverse, we find that nothing about Laurelfield's various inhabitants is at it first appears, and neither talent nor history sits on solid ground.

Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane and A Disobedient Girl

Rebecca Makkai's The Hundred-Year House is a funny, sad and delightful romp through the beginning, middle and end of an artists' colony as well as the family mansion that sheltered it and the family members who do and don't survive it. Told backwards from the viewpoints of an array of eccentric and intertwined characters, the story's secrets are revealed with stunning acuity. An ambitious work, well realized.

Rebecca Makkai is the most refreshing kind of writer there is: both genius and generous. Every masterfully crafted connection, every lovingly nestled detail, is a gift to the attentive reader. Playful, poignant, and richly rewarding, The Hundred-Year House is the most absorbing book I've read in ages. Before you've finished, you'll want to read it again.

Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints

The acclaimed author of The Borrower returns with a dazzlingly original, mordantly witty novel about the secrets of an old-money family and their turn-of-the-century estate, Laurelfield. 
 
Meet the Devohrs: Zee, a Marxist literary scholar who detests her parents’ wealth but nevertheless finds herself living in their carriage house; Gracie, her mother, who claims she can tell your lot in life by looking at your teeth; and Bruce, her step-father, stockpiling supplies for the Y2K apocalypse and perpetually late for his tee time. Then there’s Violet Devohr, Zee’s great-grandmother, who they say took her own life somewhere in the vast house, and whose massive oil portrait still hangs in the dining room. 
 
Violet’s portrait was known to terrify the artists who resided at the house from the 1920s to the 1950s, when it served as the Laurelfield Arts Colony – and this is exactly the period Zee’s husband, Doug, is interested in. An out-of-work academic whose only hope of a future position is securing a book deal, Doug is stalled on his biography of the poet Edwin Parfitt, once in residence at the colony. All he needs to get the book back on track – besides some motivation and self-esteem – is access to the colony records, rotting away in the attic for decades. But when Doug begins to poke around where he shouldn’t, he finds Gracie guards the files with a strange ferocity, raising questions about what she might be hiding. The secrets of the hundred-year house would turn everything Doug and Zee think they know about her family on its head – that is, if they were to ever uncover them. 
 
In this brilliantly conceived, ambitious, and deeply rewarding novel, Rebecca Makkai unfolds a generational saga in reverse, leading the reader back in time on a literary scavenger hunt as we seek to uncover the truth about these strange people and this mysterious house. With intelligence and humor, a daring narrative approach, and a lovingly satirical voice, Rebecca Makkai has crafted an unforgettable novel about family, fate and the incredible surprises life can offer.

Rebecca Makkai

Books by Rebecca Makkai

Articles featuring Rebecca Makkai

Books to read to learn more about the AIDS crisis

What to read after watching It’s A Sin

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