Very Cold People

Description

By (author) Manguso Sarah

Short /annotation:
Acclaimed writer Sarah Manguso makes her fiction debut with an icy, furious novel about the way in which a society can ignore and enable the abuse of young women, narrated by the daughter of just such an abusive mother.

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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

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A masterclass in unease

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Manguso is consistent in her approach and the cumulative effect is satisfying

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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