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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 in 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

Publisher Review

A masterclass in unease * Observer * 'My parents didn't belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway.' So opens Manguso's crystalline, mordant first novel about who belongs and who doesn't in a declining Massachusetts town, as fortunes and status ebb and arrivistes displace the WASP gentry. Ruthie, the protagonist, has never felt at home in her hometown, and often wonders why; like other New England communities, Waitsfield hides its secrets well, until they erupt with a vengeance. 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 independent 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. Like Ferrante's Lila and Lenu, Ruthie is sharply attuned to a force she doesn't understand. Something is pushing through the cracks in the walls, the felted wool of her coat, but she lacks the context or language to name it . . . For Ruthie, the unseen current is some combination of class, whiteness, and the widespread sexual abuse of children. -- 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 Unpicking the seamy side of a world sewn together by the everyday abuse of women and girls, Manguso reworks the stories women have been told about themselves into narratives that can be recognised, worked with. 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 . . . What elevates Very Cold People above a traditional coming-of-age novel is Manguso's insistence on not being fooled by exterior markings - historical houses with plaques on them, people with icy demeanors . . . 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 *