One of the most "brilliant" (New York Times Book Review), "wildly talented" (Chicago Tribune), and treasured authors of contemporary fiction, returns after her recent bestselling novels with Five Tuesdays in Winter, her first book of short fiction.
Told in the intimate voices of complex, endearing characters, Five Tuesdays in Winter intriguingly subverts expectations as it explores desire, loss, jolting violence, and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A reclusive bookseller begins to feel the discomfort of love again. Two college roommates have a devastating middle-aged reunion. A proud old man rages powerlessly in his granddaughter's hospital room. A writer receives a visit from all the men who have tried to suppress her voice.
Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, this wide-ranging collection of ten selected stories by one of our most accomplished chroniclers of the human heart is an exciting addition to Lily King's oeuvre of acclaimed fiction.
LILY KING is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including most recently Writers & Lovers and Euphoria. Her work has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Maine Book Award for Fiction, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and she has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award. She lives in Portland, Maine.
"Five Tuesdays in Winter moved me, inspired me, thrilled me. It filled up every chamber of my heart. I loved this book." - Ann Patchett
"These are stories of outsiders finding their people, of new perspectives, and they place King--already one of our most poignant and moving contemporary novelists--among Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, and Mary Gaitskill as one of our great short-story writers as well." - Vogue
"A masterful, enchanting collection of stories illuminating the spectrum of human love--the platonic, the unrequited, the forbidden and the unconditional." - People
"Wonderfully absorbing...All 10 of these tales build gratifyingly to moments of epiphany that never feel unearned... Long form or short, this is a writer who has mastered the art of conveying depths of human feeling in one beautiful sentence after another." - NPR
"The acclaimed author of Writers & Lovers returns with ten shimmering stories, each one a gemlike exploration of love, loss, and grief... Each masterful story reminds us that King is one of our finest cartographers of the human heart." - Esquire
"Breathlessly beautiful." - Zibby Owens, Good Morning America
"King's observations are both sharp and generous. Five Tuesdays in Winter is a collection worth dipping into again and again." - Bookpage
"These stories crackle and shine, and King is a master of the thumbnail portrait: she can create a fully realized life in a single paragraph and then alter it in breathtaking ways. This is a must for fans of the short story." - Publishers Weekly
"[A] dazzling new collection . . . Though the protagonists range from a young girl to a middle-aged gay man to a gruff nonagenarian grandfather, the stories share certain characteristics; King is a master at conveying through subtle description the small, painful, bumbling moments of life and the awkwardness of human interactions . . . A series of beautifully written character studies brimming with insight into the human condition." - Library Journal
"King can make you fall in love with a character fast, especially the smart, vulnerable, often painfully self-conscious adolescent protagonists featured in several of the 10 stories collected here...Full of insights and pleasures." - Kirkus
