Bowlaway: A Novel - Couverture souple

“Wildly entertaining... [A] wonderfully unpredictable multi-generational saga which revolves around a Massachusetts bowling alley.... Bowlaway celebrates the oddest of oddballs and the freakiest of freak accidents with wit and heart. To read McCracken’s inimitably clever sentences and follow her quirky narrative twists is to be constantly delighted.” (NPR)

“Death and life, frosted with macabre comedy.... [McCracken] lures us in with her witty voice and oddball characters but then kicks the wind out of us. She never misses the infamous 7-10 split, managing to hit Annie Proulx and Anne Tyler with the same ball.... Endlessly surprising.” (Washington Post)

“An oddball masterpiece.... Elizabeth McCracken holds a funhouse mirror up to the Great American Novel. Whimsy and weirdness spark at Bowlaway’s edges.... This is McCracken’s masterpiece, a story of reinvention.... The author has reframed the family saga for the misfit: that truest American character.” (Entertainment Weekly)

“McCracken’s newest novel, a 20th-century family epic centered on candlepin bowling, is populated by strange, excellent characters, and unfolds with all the offbeat coziness and heartache of a great American fable: molasses floods, workplace fires, surprising heirs, and all.” (Vanity Fair)

“[McCracken has] considerable gifts as a novelist [and] instinctive access to the most intricate threads of human thought and feeling.... This novel’s cast grows epic, but McCracken is always most impressive when she works small, when she is describing movie kisses or corsets or simply loneliness and longing.” (New York Times)

“Bowlaway is that most improbable of literary phenomena: a buoyant, joyful, rollicking yarn of sadness and loss.... McCracken’s gloriously vibrant and boisterously surprising narrative voice is one of the great triumphs of Bowlaway.... Reminiscent of John Irving, with echoes of Dickens.... A tour de force.” (Boston Globe)

“Reading Elizabeth McCracken—the gorgeously-put-together sentences parading the pages like models on a Paris runway; the crazy, original insights; the definitive, wholly fictional pronouncements—is like going on an automotive safari. . . . I could not stop reading.” (Newsday)

“McCracken’s delightful prose and rich historical details make this the perfect book to get lost in.” (Real Simple)

“Every now and then, a novel reinvents the language of storytelling in dazzling ways.... A comic marvel... The master stylist uses the offbeat lilt of fairy tales to spin a quintessentially New England saga.... Rolls a strike right through the heart of the American epic.” (O, the Oprah Magazine)

“Whimsical, enchanting.... The sort of novel with which you fall in love.... Every page seems to provide the kind of writing that makes a reader stop cold, savoring the moment.... [Bowlaway] takes your hand and hurries you into an inviting, curious world, leaving you happily bereft at its end.” (Seattle Times)