The Hero of this Book

How reassuring it is to have writers like Elizabeth McCracken among us... One of those fleet-footed writers who will never be trapped, or even reliably tracked, by aboutness... Her speciality is the interior, and the interior is vast. We must bring our own compasses, emotional and aesthetic.

Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

Her words create an exquisite alchemy that makes a reader ready to follow her anywhere, believe every word she writes down... With every vital, potent sentence, McCracken conveys the electric and primal nature of that first fundamental love.

New York Times

Wonderful... Through The Hero of This Book, McCracken extends her mother's heaven to our memories. I'll be thinking about her with great affection for a very long time.

Washington Post

An accounting of the self that refuses autobiography, a travelogue about being lost, a novel that is really a theory of fiction, an elegy that sidesteps solemnity: The Hero of This Book brilliantly disarms our usual modes of thinking. Elizabeth McCracken is one of America's finest writers, fascinating, inventive, and profound.

Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness

I absolutely loved it. A moving portrayal of daughterhood, achingly precise on memory and grief, and suffused with warmth and love.

Megan Hunter, author of The Harpy

Into a single, most singular novel, McCracken fits everything we adult daughters know and feel and love and fear about our beautiful, complicated mothers, and could never say. A sublime gift.

Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss

McCracken's novels awe me endlessly. I read this wondering how she was managing to make me laugh and cry at the same time.

Daily Mail, *Books of the Year*

Teases out her McCracken's strengths: a domestic tale about family life in all its weirdness and warmth.

The Times, *Books to Look Out For 2023*

This slender book is a powerful tribute to its author's 'hero': her clever, undaunted mother.

Harper's Bazaar

A life-affirming novel about death which finds humour in the difficulties that await us all, joy and poignancy in the everyday.

i

What could be better value than a book set over one day that you can read in one day, but that will stay in your heart and refuse to go... One of the greatest memoirs of a parent.

The Times

Light of touch, witty... Raises all kinds of chewy questions about truth, fiction and where to draw the boundaries of the imagination, both in life and prose... Deeply moving.

Daily Mail

A soulful, searching portrait.

Times Literary Supplement

A more loving and moving tribute to its subject is hard to imagine.

Guardian

Confirms McCracken as among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life. Like Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett, she combines a blistering intelligence with deep humanity.

Guardian

Easily one of the best novels (or is it actually a memoir?) that will be published this year... It is touching and funny, and full of sharp-eyed observations about family life and parents and how your childhood forms you.

The Times

This story is a tribute to how great writing can elevate any subject.

Sunday Times, *Summer Reads of 2023*

Gorgeous... Not a word is wasted.

Jack Edwards on YouTube

McCracken is such a witty writer, full of sharp observations about life, writing, relationships and the people she meets.

The Times, *Books of the Year*

Touching and funny, and full of sharp-eyed observations about family life and parents and how your childhood forms you. By the end, you feel real affection for the narrator’s (at times confounding) mother.

The Times

A short, taut, restlessly shape-shifting novel.

Jewish Chronicle