Synopses & Reviews
The warm, wry, and patient voice of a veterinarian father tells the heartfelt story of his young New England family enduring a moving trial of loyalty, hope, and faith after they are confronted with an unthinkable crisis. Acclaimed author Yannick Murphy's intimate narrative style and lovely prose will enthrall readers of Rivka Galchen, Padgett Powell, and Murphy's own Signed, Mata Hari. The Call is a "triumph of quiet humor and understated beauty" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) from an author that the New York Times Book Review calls "an extraordinarily gifted fabulist."
Review
"Murphy's eye for small-town detail and human/animal relations makes for a complex, delicate story line, and the novel as a whole carries a very real human velocity and gravity. The domestic focus and unexpected intrusions recall fiction by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida." Library Journal
Review
"This is a wonderful novel. Original, suspenseful, funny and profoundly moving. It's about family, community, the human bond with animals and — oh yeah — spaceships. I am in awe of Yannick Murphy's achievement and I plan to recommend The Call to everyone I know." Geraldine Brooks
Review
"Yannick Murphy's beautiful new novel is a stirring example of what a real writer can do with form and feeling. The Call is sly, funny, scary, honest, wonderstruck and, most of all, intensely generous." Sam Lipsyte
Review
"This book delights with its discrete structuring....The pieces snap together in odd juxtaposition, surprising, making a picture more sturdy and dependable than the seamless whole. It has the power of good old Byzantine mosaic." Padgett Powell
Review
"Murphy is a subtle, psychologically perceptive writer....A marvelous book: sweet and poignant without ever succumbing to easy sentiment, formally inventive and dexterous without ever seeming showy. A triumph." Kirkus Review (Starred Review)
Synopsis
"Yannick Murphy, while being one of our most daring andoriginal writers, is first and foremost an exquisitely attuned observer ofhuman behavior. . . . Murphy's work provides pretty much unexceededreading pleasure."
--Dave EggersThewarm, wry, and patient voice of a veterinarian father tells the heartfelt storyof his young New England family enduring a moving trial of loyalty, hope, andfaith after they are confronted with an unthinkable crisis. Acclaimed author Yannick Murphy's intimate narrative style and lovely prosewill enthrall readers of Rivka Galchen, Padgett Powell, and Murphy's own Signed, Mata Hari.The Call is a "triumph of quiet humorand understated beauty" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) from anauthor that the New York Times Book Review calls "an extraordinarilygifted fabulist."
About the Author
Yannick Murphy is the author of the novels Signed, Mata Hari, Here They Come, and The Sea of Trees, as well as two story collections and several children's books. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Chesterfield Screenwriting Award.
Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She lives in Vermont with her veterinarian husband and their children.