Description
Book SynopsisAn astronaut who will go on to be the first man to walk on the moon. A child of privilege who has run away to work in a pilots' bar in the Mojave Desert. A love affair that interacts with three of the twentieth century's most iconic moments: the race to space, the rage against the Vietnam War, and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic.
Trade ReviewSixties radicalism and the space program are set in fruitful juxtaposition ... Displays
a sure-handed lyricism * The New Yorker *
Alcott is an impressionistic stylist capable of
lovely, luminous effects on the brushstroke level of the sentence ...
Alcott is at her best in zero gravity. * Wall Street Journal *
Readers who value elegant style will
savour Alcott's musical sentences and dreamlike pacing ... Readers who enjoy literary fiction have a golden opportunity to not just look, but also to really see.
Highly recommended. * Pittsburgh Post-Gazette *
A marvel of compression and controlled description ...
Fay's ambition, at the start of America Was Hard to Find, is to make life 'happen more deeply inside her.' Alcott's novel is a finely calibrated machine that does the same for us. * BookForum *
[Alcott's] prose has a way of finding the
cinematic in the personal .... Alcott's narration is penetrating and elegant, but she gives her characters
some of the wittiest and most screen-ready dialogue in contemporary fiction. * Paris Review *
Powerful....
America Was Hard to Find leaves readers wanting more of this story and everything else Alcott has written. * BookPage *
Like Franzen or DeLillo, Alcott brings awe-inspiring exactitude and lyricism to her dive into three of America's most iconic moments.... In her exquisite and poignant reimagining of historic events, Alcott dissects their impacts in
a sweeping yet intimate saga that challenges assumptions and assesses the depths of human frustration. * Booklist *
Absorbing ...
Ambitious ...
Shimmering, knife-sharp descriptions of small and often devastating moments of individual experience within those larger histories ... The reader experiences the era's social upheavals and contests of values at their most intimate register. * New York Times Book Review *
Alcott's is a striking voice,
visceral and electric * I paper *
America Was Hard To Find is an ambitious attempt to capture three turbulent decades of political unrest...
Kathleen Alcott is an author to watch * IRISH EXAMINER *
