Excerpt
“These are dazzling stories, deeply felt and elegantly written. As I read them, I kept thinking I was reading Alice Munro but, no, I was reading Laura Furman.”Lily Tuck, author of the National Book Award-winning The News from Paraguay"Furman, as any good artist must, shows us not just how to read but how we might live." San Francisco Chronicle“There are no false notes anywhere in this collection….suffused with a deep sense of what abides.”Booklist“Furman's prose ambles sinuously, in unexpected directions, and has a quiet, sure effect.” Publishers Weekly"Stories of incredible grace and heft from materials as humble as they come: the dips and turns of family life. The real revelation of stories like these is that humble material rarely is. Narratives that pivot on failed mother-daughter relationships are conveyed in a concerto form that permits motifs to twist and mimic each other. Each triothe book might be better described as a series of novellasturns a parade of divorces and picnics into an echo chamber, sounding the depths of the ordinary and asserting that what happens to us, however small, matters big time....The delivery is all Alice Munro, a clear-eyed account of the regrets that swell up under the superficial....This collection is lifelike in the most ruthless and wonderful senseit defies tidy homilies but delivers the visceral goods."The Austin Chronicle“No book could be more beautifully formed or more deeply satisfying than The Mother Who Stayed, with its stories in sets, expanding and correcting each other, offering surprises. With unflinching accuracy, Laura Furman has traced versions of motheringsimulated, lacking, and realin rich, precise fiction.”Joan Silber, author of The Size of the World and Ideas of Heaven“In these powerful and exquisite stories, Laura Furman pieces words together like shapes in a gorgeous crazy quilt. Each character and setting is so vividly realized that by the last page I knew these women and could imagine finding their homes without a map. I loved this book and, like the best fiction, it has changed me.”Julie Metz, author of The New York Times bestselling memoir Perfection“I love these stories. They read like a cycle of songsgorgeous, moving, and making sense, somehow, of the mad complexity of life. I don’t ask for anything more in a book.”Lynn Freed, author of The Servants’ Quarters