RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThis is the best thing Sedaris has ever written ... No point planning a heist; Sedaris has opened the vault himself. The genius of The Best of Me is that it reveals the growth of a writer, a sense of how his outlook has changed and where he finds humor ... It is miraculous to read these pieces placed close together, the earliest written without any knowledge of where things would lead, the last guffawing at the ridiculousness of where they did ... You must read The Best of Me. It will be a new experience, knowing that enough time has passed to find humor in the hardest parts of life. More than ever — we’re allowed to laugh.
Margaret Atwood
RaveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewIn MaddAddam, the third volume of Atwood’s apocalyptic MaddAddam trilogy, she has sent the survivors of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood to a compound where they await a final showdown. But what gives MaddAddam such tension and light are the final revelations of how this new world came to be, and how the characters made their way to this battle for the future of humanity … Like its predecessors, MaddAddam is as much a story of adolescent longing and disappointment as it is of life before and after the Waterless Flood. In Atwood’s world, hearts broken early in life don’t heal; the larger strokes of politics and plague are less important to these books than the small hurts and jealousies of its survivors...And yet, for all this sorrow, the novel is also filled with humor and joy.
Lucy Wood
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewLike Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn and Nora Webster, Wood’s novel has no burning secrets or sudden deaths; instead, it deploys a sequence of small gestures with such sleight-of-hand that the reader never guesses whether joy, injury or humiliation is ahead — much like life ... Precise, unindulgent, fresh and honest, every page is a celebration.
