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Very Cold People
Sarah Manguso
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Description for Very Cold People
Paperback.
Guardian's Best Fiction of the Year
'One of the most original and exciting writers working in English today' - Jhumpa Lahiri
Once home to the country's most illustrious families, Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is now an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape, Ruthie learns how the town's prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history and how silence often masks a legacy of harm - from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends.
In Very Cold People Sarah Manguso reveals the suffocating constraints of growing up ... Read morein a very old, and very cold, small town. Here lies a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smouldering rage . . .
'Chilling . . . deeply impressive' - Guardian
'A masterclass in unease' - The Observer
Longlisted for the Wingate Prize 2023
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Product Details
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About Sarah Manguso
Sarah Manguso is the author of 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, The Two Kinds of Decay, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, Siste Viator, and The Captain Lands in Paradise. Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and her books have been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Her poems have ... Read morewon a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series, and her essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review. She has taught graduate and undergraduate writing at institutions including Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Scripps College, and the University of Iowa. She lives in Los Angeles. Show Less
Reviews for Very Cold People
A masterclass in unease
Observer
Manguso puts her own indelible stamp on the literary terrain of John Cheever and Susan Minot, daring to brush against the third rail of class.
Oprah Daily
Magnificent . . . I hope all my fellow reader friends can find their way to this title either through their local library or ... Read moreindependent bookseller. It is indeed special.
Sarah Jessica Parker via Instagram An uncomfortable, deeply impressive account of how silence, snobbery and repression in a New England town allow the poison of abuse to trickle down the decades.
'Best Fiction of 2022', The Guardian Sarah Manguso is one of the most original and exciting writers working in English today. Every word feels necessary, and she’s redefining genre as she goes
Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies With its adult narrator trying to recover the intuitions of her younger self, Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet.
Katy Waldon
New Yorker
Manguso is consistent in her approach and the cumulative effect is satisfying
Damon Galgut
TLS
Very Cold People knocked me to my knees. So precise, so austere, so elegant, this story is devastatingly familiar to those of us who know the loneliness of growing up in a place of extreme emotional restraint. Manguso is one of my favourite writers, and this book is a revelation
Lauren Groff, author of Florida Midwesterners, New Englanders and anyone from small town America will recognize the contours in this quietly beautiful novel about what it feels like to grow up an outsider. It's a starkly lyrical exploration of the darkness that lies underneath a lily white community with an emotional resonance that sneaks up on you and won't let go.
Good Housekeeping
I loved every sentence, thought, and gesture in this perfect novel. Sarah Manguso has painted a deeply moving portrait of the stark unreality of childhood
Catherine Lacey, author of Pew I loved it and am still trying to accommodate its cold quality - like swallowing an ice-cube by accident. Manguso’ steady gaze and clarity of expression is reminiscent of Louise Gluck. I hope it will do as brilliantly as it deserves.
Laura Beatty, author of Pollard The book is strong enough as a compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived. The effect is cumulative, and this novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight
Alexandra Jacobs
New York Times
A haunted masterpiece, written with the precision of a miniaturist and the vulnerability of true heartache. I wept more than once; I recognized myself more than once. Very Cold People proves yet again that Manguso is one of the greats
Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less Very Cold People is an important stitch in a tapestry being urgently reworked by women writers. Manguso's is a bold stitch, a beautiful and a vital one.
Joanna Walsh, author of Break.up A poignant and unnerving masterwork about growing up in a dominator society, told with the concision, carefulness, and sense of mystery that we’ve come to expect from Sarah Manguso
Tao Lin, author of Leave Society Manguso’s attention to the chilliness and reservation of certain New Englanders crackles like a room-temperature beverage poured over ice . . . Manguso portrays the fears surrounding girlhood with a blistering clarity.
Michele Filgate
Washington Post
Chilling . . . Set in the 1980s in a small, frigid New England town, this coming-of-age story offers a stark take on what it is to feel poor, poorly nurtured, and inadequately loved in a class-conscious, lily-white town whose antique houses were built and occupied by generations of Cabots and Emersons . . . absorbs our attention and stirs empathy and reflection.
NPR
Very Cold People wields a kind of detached, anthropological power, portraying the world through the accumulation of telling details.
Wall Street Journal
Unafraid to engage with tricky topics like race and class in America, Very Cold People may not warm your heart, necessarily. But it will pick you up after it knocks you down, and leave you stronger for it.
Chicago Review of Books
Manguso is a lovely writer about unlovely things . . . here she depicts her protagonist’s quiet agony with a poet’s eye . . . A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful.
Kirkus, (starred review)
Manguso is an exquisitely astute writer, and there is something admirable about her refusal to bow to predictable plot tropes that might rescue Ruthie more definitively — or condemn her.
Boston Globe
Her rendering of violence, abuse and secrecy within families and communities is clear-eyed and almost uncomfortably lyrical — the beauty of her writing makes the tragedies she describes feel all the more wrenching.
Los Angeles Times
Manguso excels at capturing the perspective of a child desperate for the love of people who don’t know how to give it.
The Spectator
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