Staff Pick
I have never read a book that treats family, depression, and relationships with more tenderness or grace. It’s also possible that I’ve never read a book this tragic. Adam Haslett follows a family as they grapple with the grave mental illness of their father and eldest brother, and the highs and lows along the way. While much of the book is sorrowful, Haslett is a writer with a masterful grasp of language and character, and the results are a deeply moving and powerful novel that I have urged everyone I know to read, even (especially?) as it brought me to tears. Recommended By Tim B., Powells.com
Imagine Me Gone takes a look at mental illness and its effect on family, and it doesn't get much better than how Haslett has done it here. John is afflicted, and he passes it on to his son, Michael; wife Margaret, and siblings Alec and Celia are pulled along for the ride. Trying to negotiate the ramifications of therapy, institutionalism, medication, and health care costs, Alec and Celia push for their brother's treatment, but bring about much more than they planned. So indicative of modern-day medical science's failure to treat the mentally ill with compassion (or, at all, even), Imagine Me Gone is a heartbreaking tale of a family with nowhere to turn but toward themselves. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the most?
When Margaret's fiancé, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings — the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec — struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence.
Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family.
With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives.
Review
"Haslett’s latest is a sprawling, ambitious epic about a family bound not only by familial love, but by that sense of impending emergency that hovers around Michael, who has inherited his father John’s abiding depression and anxiety….This is a book that tenderly and luminously deals with mental illness and with the life of the mind…. In Michael, Haslett has created a most memorable character. This is a hypnotic and haunting novel." Publishers Weekly
(Starred Review)
Review
"Imagine Me Gone is an extraordinary work of art. The family Adam Haslett has created feels as true and as complex as our own actual families are, and lays nearly as deep a claim upon our love and loyalty. The eldest son, Michael, is simply one of the finest characters I’ve ever come across in fiction. This beautiful, tragic novel will haunt you for the rest of your life and you will be all the more human for it."
Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winner for Tinkers
Review
"Adam Haslett’s second novel is about family, love, forgotten music, and a despair that proves unbearable, and has one of the most harrowing and sustained descriptions of a mind in obsessive turmoil and disrepair that I’ve ever read. Haslett is a marvelously lucid and intelligent writer." Joy Williams
Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Quick and the Dead
Review
"Imagine Me Gone is beautiful, it’s terrifying, it’s intimate and epic, and it’s devastating—one of the great books about loss and mourning and the ineluctable laws that govern the political economy of families. I cannot describe the force or the depth of its accomplishment except to say that this magnificent work of art has overwhelmed me and broken my heart. It will take me a long time to come to terms with this novel." Tony Kushner
Author of Angels in America
Synopsis
FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION
TOP 10 NOVELS OF THE YEAR --
TIME, Newsday
TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2016
-- San Francisco Chronicle
20 BOOKS THAT DEFINED OUR YEAR
-- Wall Street Journal
ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS: Barnes & Noble, BookPage, BuzzFeed,
Elle, Financial Times, Huffington Post,
Kirkus, NPR, Refinery29,
Seattle Times, Shelf Awareness, WBUR's
On Point
Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Fiction Prize, the Kirkus Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
"Haslett is one of the country's most talented writers, equipped with a sixth sense for characterization"
-Wall Street Journal "Ambitious and stirring . . . With
Imagine Me Gone, Haslett has reached another level."
--New York Times Book Review New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the most?
When Margaret's fiance, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings -- the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec -- struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence.
Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family.
With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives.
Synopsis
FINALIST for the PULITZER PRIZE
LONG-LISTED for the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
WINNER of the LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE
FINALIST for the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
FINALIST for the KIRKUS PRIZE
LONG-LISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL
TOP 10 NOVELS OF THE YEAR -- TIME, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, BBC, Newsday
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Barnes & Noble, BookPage, BuzzFeed, Elle, Financial Times, Huffington Post, Kirkus, NPR, Refinery29, Seattle Times, Shelf Awareness, WBUR's On Point
"Haslett is one of the country's most talented writers, equipped with a sixth sense for characterization" --Wall Street Journal
"Ambitious and stirring . . . With Imagine Me Gone, Haslett has reached another level." --New York Times Book Review
From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the most?
When Margaret's fiance, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings -- the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec -- struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence.
Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family.
With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives.
Synopsis
From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the most? When Margaret's fianc e, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him.
Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings -- the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec -- struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence.
Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family.
With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives.
"Haslett is one of the country's most talented writers, equipped with a sixth sense for characterization"-Wall Street Journal
"Ambitious and stirring . . . With Imagine Me Gone, Haslett has reached another level."-New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Adam Haslett is the author of the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, which was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, and the novel Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. His books have been translated into eighteen languages, and he has received the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, the PEN/Malamud Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. He lives in New York City.