The Hero of This Book: A sublime gift Meg Mason

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A taut, groundbreaking new novel from bestselling and award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, about a writer's relationship with her larger-than-life mother - and about the very nature of writing A Book of the Year in the New Yorker, Time, NPR, Washington Post, People Magazine and Oprah Daily A taut, groundbreaking new novel about a writer's relationship with her larger-than-life mother - and about the very nature of writing 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 reflecting on her mother's life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the future- back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed. The woman, a writer, recalls all that made her complicated mother extraordinary - her brilliant wit, her generosity, her unbelievable obstinacy, her sheer will in seizing life despite physical difficulties - and finds herself wondering how her mother had endured. Even though she wants to respect her mother's nearly pathological sense of privacy, the woman must come to terms with whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal. The Hero of This Book is a searing examination of grief and renewal, and of a deeply felt relationship between a child and her parents. At once comic and heartbreaking, with prose that surprises at every turn, this is a novel of such piercing love and tenderness that we are reminded that art is what remains when all else falls away.

Reviews

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 *
[H]er 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 *
Easily one of the best novels (or is it actually a memoir) that will be published this year. -- Robbie Millen * The Times *
A soulful, searching portrait. * Times Literary Supplement *
A more loving and moving tribute to its subject is hard to imagine. -- John Self * Guardian *
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 * Harper's Magazine *
This new short novel...teases out her [McCracken's] strengths: a domestic tale about family life in all its weirdness and warmth. * The Times, *Books to Look Out For 2023* *
This slender book is a powerful tribute to its author's 'hero': her clever, undaunted mother. * Harper's Bazaar *
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... an extraordinarily vivid portrait of an extraordinary - and much beloved - mother... [a] wonderful book. * Guardian *
McCracken's novels awe me endlessly. I read this wondering how she was managing to make me laugh and cry at the same time. -- Nathan Harris * Daily Mail, *Books of the Year* *
An accounting of the self that refuses autobiography, a travelogue about being lost, a novel that is really a theory of fiction, an elegy that sidesteps solemnity: The Hero of This Book brilliantly disarms our usual modes of thinking. Elizabeth McCracken is one of America's finest writers, fascinating, inventive, and profound. -- Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
Told with McCracken's trademark self-deprecating wit, the "hero" of the book comes alive in this tribute. * Financial Times *
I absolutely loved it. A moving portrayal of daughterhood, achingly precise on memory and grief, and suffused with warmth and love. -- Megan Hunter, author of The Harpy
Wonderful... Through The Hero of This Book, McCracken extends her mother's heaven to our memories. I'll be thinking about her with great affection for a very long time. * Washington Post *
[A] life-affirming novel about death which finds humour in the difficulties that await us all, joy and poignancy in the everyday. * i *
Light of touch, witty... Raise[s] all kinds of chewy questions about truth, fiction and where to draw the boundaries of the imagination, both in life and prose... deeply moving. * Daily Mail *
[A] life-affirming novel about death which finds humour in the difficulties that await us all, joy and poignancy in the everyday. * Scotsman *

Author Bio

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.