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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD"Haslett is one of the country's most talented writers, equipped with a sixth sense for characterization."--Wall Street Journal"Ambitious and stirring . . . With Imagine Me Gone, Haslett has reached another level." --New York Times Book ReviewNew York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceBest Books of 2016 So Far -- Time and Refinery29From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the mostWhen Margaret's fianc, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings -- the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec -- struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence. Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family. With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives.
About the Author
Adam Haslett is the author of the novel Union Atlantic and the New York Times best-selling short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and has been translated into fifteen languages. The collection was one of Time Magazine's Five Best Books of the Year, a selection of Today's book club, and the winner of the 2006 PEN/Malamud Award. Haslett has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, The O'Henry Prize Stories, and National Public Radio's Selected Shorts. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Yale Law School, he currently lives in New York City.
Photo copyright Brigitte Lacombe
