Description

A taut, groundbreaking new novel about a writer’s relationship with her larger-than-life mother – and about the very nature of writing

‘Easily one of the best novels that will be published this year’
THE TIMES

‘McCracken is among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life’
GUARDIAN

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.

Publisher Review

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 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 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 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 * [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 *