Bret Anthony Johnston Press Reviews
'I'm looking forward to a week in southern Spain in the company of Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston. It has a fascinating fictional premise: a missing child who comes back and a changed family who have to get used to the idea. I've dipped into it already and the writing is clear and beautiful. Besides, a novel that comes with effusive quotes from John Irving and Alice Sebold has to be pretty good.' -- Elizabeth Day Observer (Best Summer Reads 2014)
'Johnston's excellent debut is primarily a literary novel, with old-fashioned virtues such as rich characterisation, strong structure and impeccable control of tone. Although it is reminiscent of John Updike, the mixture of summer heat and melancholy feels peculiarly Texan' The Sunday Times
'enthralling and skillful... the book's beauty is in its complexity, in its characters endless search for the truth... uncomfortably revealing... What Johnston captures and examines so expertly isn't the kind of sadistic cruelty familiar to anyone with a television, but a subtler, more quietly menacing variety, the eggshell tiptoeing, the killing kindness we unknowingly inflict when acting out of love and fear... Remember Me Like This isn't a novel about kidnapping. It's not a psychological study of Stockholm syndrome or a victimology. It's not a thriller, and it's not even really a mystery, unless it's an unsolved one, the exquisitely moral mystery of how we struggle to accept and love the people we call family, even when we can't fully know them' New York Times
'Johnston has an ear for tidy phrases that pinpoint the elegiac in ho-hum domesticity, noting how blinds ladder light on to a bedspread or how, looking at Justin's sad father, an elderly widow would like to sop him up with a biscuit . It's a suspenseful, uplifting portrait of a family in crisis.' Observer
About Bret Anthony Johnston
Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories, which was described by David Mitchell as 'a gorgeous, accomplished debut', and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Independent and the Irish Times, and the novel Remember Me Like This, a New York Times Editor's Choice and one of the Observer's best Holiday Reads 2014. His work appears in the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, the Paris Review, the Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he's the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a 5 Under 35 honor from the National Book Foundation. He teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Harvard University, where he is the Director of Creative Writing. bretanthonyjohnston.com Facebook/BAJbooks
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