The Liar's Wife: Four Novellas - Softcover

"Richly imagined and finely wrought. . . . The Liar's Wife feels both warmly familiar and arrestingly original." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The intelligence that breathes through [Gordon's] characters tirelessly raises the unanswerable questions that animate all great fiction, lifting the reader out of the story and into the realm of ethical dilemma." --The New York Times Book Review

"Pitch-perfect. . . . [Here are] four stories that are models of compression and searing insight. . . . Gordon's voice is wry, her prose velvety." --Oprah Magazine

"Thought-provoking. . . . The contemplative tales collected in The Liar's Wife . . . force us to slow down and reflect. . . . Gordon's characters are critical thinkers, people whose minds churn constantly with questions." --The Washington Post

"Gordon's skills are formidable; her writing, careful and exact. . . . [She] excels at the kind of minute observations that make her characters real." --The Boston Globe

"Artful. . . . Riveting. . . . The four novellas in this volume have the genre's characteristic combination of close narrative focus with enough wattage to pick out complexities of situation and character. What a blessing for their readers." --The Washington Times

"A satisfying mix of narrative and perception. . . . [A] delight. . . . As Gordon admirably demonstrates in this quartet, the novella with its concentrated range is as pleasing a genre as any other." --Richmond Times-Dispatch

"The Liar's Wife glints with Gordon's enduring mettle: She draws from the dross of everyday life, a hidden gold. . . . Gordon is at her best." --The Buffalo News

"[A] beautifully rendered book. . . . The novella is an underutilized form, but Gordon shows a great affinity for its necessary constraints. In each 60-or-so-page story she manages to compress a trove of details, giving readers wholly fleshed worlds to savor and contemplate." --BookPage

"Gordon returns to her favorite thematic territory: faith, innocence and their loss, intellectual ambition, physical affliction, self-sacrifice and guilt. . . . [She] enchants." --Montgomery Advertiser

"Gordon['s] book is worth reading, for her wonderful language, her insights and her willingness to take on difficult issues." --The National (AE)

"The Liar's Wife is a meaty and thoughtful book. . . . These are stories told in memory and questions by characters still moved by encounters and ideas that shaped them in pivotal moments. . . . Emotional and insightful." --Book Reporter

"Incandescent. . . . Just like a great Gordon novel times four." --Library Journal

Here we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her last days as a transplant in New York City; a vulnerable American graduate student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title, who gets more out of life than most; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high schooler in the Midwest. At every turn, Gordon revels in the interactions and crucial flashes of understanding that change lives forever. Entrancing reading, "The Liar s Wife" is a wonderful demonstration of Gordon s literary mastery and human sympathy."