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The Hero of this Book

byElizabeth McCracken

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‘A sublime gift’ MEG MASON

From the bestselling author, a taut, heartrending new novel about a writer’s relationship with her larger-than-life mother.

Ten months after her mother’s death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book walks across London on a quiet Sunday. The city was a favourite of her mother’s, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself recalling all that made her complicated mother extraordinary. Even though the woman, a writer, wants to respect her mother’s nearly pathological sense of privacy, she must decide whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal.

* A New Yorker, Time, Washington Post, Oprah Daily and NPR Book of the Year *

‘I absolutely loved it. A moving portrayal of daughterhood…suffused with warmth and love’
MEGAN HUNTER

‘Confirms McCracken as among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life… wonderful’
GUARDIAN

‘Tender, funny, heartbreaking… a writer who always delights’
RUMAAN ALAM

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

About Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken is the award-winning author of eight books including The Giant's House (a National Book Award finalist), Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award), and The Hero of This Book (winner of the Wingate Prize). She has received grants and fellow­ships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she was chosen as one of Granta's twenty best American writers under forty. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and taught at the University of Texas at Austin.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • ISBN: 9781529919653
  • Length: 192 pages
  • Dimensions: 198mm x 12mm x 130mm
  • Weight: 141g
  • Price: £9.99
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