Rules for Visiting

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Description

'Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward'

May is at a crossroads. Although her career as a gardener for the university is flourishing, the rest of her life has narrowed to a parched routine. Her father is elderly, her brother estranged, and she keeps her neighbours at arm's length. The missing element, she realises, might be friendship. As May sets off on a journey to visit four neglected friends one-by-one, she holds herself (and them) to humorously high standards, while at home she begins to confront the pain of her past and imagine for herself a different kind of future. May's quest becomes an exploration of the power, and perhaps limits, of modern friendship.

Reviews

An engaging and compassionate portrait of how a root-bound, constricted life can begin to bloom. Drawing inspiration from mythic sources, Kane explores the power of friendship and of our connection to the natural world. Her descriptions of plants are transporting -- Madeline Miller, author * Circe *
An elegant and deeply moving meditation on friendship, family, and life on earth. Rules for Visiting is a wonderful novel -- Emily St. John Mandel, author * Station Eleven *
Jessica Francis Kane's precise and moving Rules For Visiting is an altogether new sort of friendship novel, one about friendships stretched to their limits over time and space, the sort of friendships so many of us count as our closest. Kane's gift for describing beauty and loneliness, the real stuff of life, is unparalleled -- Emma Straub, author * The Vacationers *
Jessica Francis Kane's novel will win your heart: Single, melancholy, resourceful, May Attaway, the 40-year-old protagonist of Rules for Visiting, sets out on travels to rekindle her oldest friendships, and thereby to find herself. Wry, witty, ultimately uplifting, this gem of a novel celebrates the gifts in our ordinary lives -- Claire Messud, author * The Burning Girl *
Jessica Francis Kane has written a vivid, elegant and masterfully constructed novel about friendship and neighbors and our own personal odysseys. This is a deeply smart book, one I had difficulty putting down. There is real wisdom in these pages -- Stuart Nadler, author * The Inseparables *
Told in clean, rigorous prise that neither sensationalises not sentimentalises... this novel blooms in you like a flower * Daily Mail *
There's a wonderful richness here in every sentence-a lyric and ambling directness that immediately feels like visiting with an old friend, and applied to an ordinariness that soon becomes sublime with topics that go anywhere and then always back to the cure this narrator is in search of: a remedy for her hesitation with life, that feels like a much larger disappointment, almost global. The novel, you soon realize, is perhaps the remedy she searches for, and you almost wish you could give it to her. But take this home with you, as this, this is for us -- Alexander Chee, author * How to Write an Autobiographical Novel *
A lovely, deceptively simple novel * Metro *
Rules for Visiting is a sweet book. I devoured it...If you do read one happy book in the morass of depressing lit which exists then Rules for Visiting is perfect -- thebobsphere.wordpress.com
Charming, lovely, funny and relevant * Red Magazine *
Reveals the power and limitations of modern day friendships * Evening Standard *
[Has a] deep charm... ruminative * Mail on Sunday *
A voyage of self-discovery . . . [a] subtle, wryly funny and warm-hearted study of friendship -- Simple Things Magazine

Author Bio

Jessica Francis Kane's first novel, The Report, was chosen as one of the Best Reads 2012 for the Channel 4 TV Book Club. She is also the author of two story collections, Bending Heaven (Chatto & Windus, 2003) and This Close (Graywolf, 2013). She lives in New York City with her husband and their two children.