Schroder: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• “In Schroder, Amity Gaige explores the rich, murky realm where parental devotion edges into mania, and logic crabwalks into crime. This offbeat, exquisitely written novel showcases a fresh, forceful young voice in American letters.”

  — Jennifer Egan, New York Times bestselling author

• “The measure of Gaige’s great gifts as a storyteller is that she persuades you to believe in a situation that shouldn’t be believable and to love a narrator who shouldn’t be lovable. Seldom has such a daring concept for a novel been grounded in such an appealing character.”

  — Jonathan Franzen, New York Times bestselling author

• “You will not want to put this book down. You will want to read it in one big gulp. This is a bullet of a novel, aimed at our pieties about parenthood and familial love. You won’t soon forget Schroder or his daughter or the sentences that bring them to life. To those who know Gaige’s first two novels, it’s no surprise she’s produced another stunner. To those who don’t, you’re in for a treat.”

  — Adam Haslett, New York Times bestselling author

• “Strikingly original.”

  — Reader’s Digest

• “Gaige’s spot-on prose makes this quirky parental drama irresistible.”

  — Good Housekeeping

• “Like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Schroder is charming and deceptive, likable and flawed, a conman who has a clever way with words. Schroder’s tale is deeply engaging, and Gaige’s writing is surprising and original, but the real pull of this magnetic novel is the moral ambiguity the reader feels.”

  — People

• “A lyrical and poetic novel about the adverse ramifications of a little white lie that follows its teller throughout his life.”

  — O, The Oprah Magazine

• “Brilliantly written…What could be a hackneyed novelistic trope—the confessional letter—is completely transformed in Gaige’s sure and insightful hands…Schroderis a haunting look at the extreme desire for love and family and how the mind can justify that need to possess what it cannot have. Almost, just almost, Schroder has us rooting for him.”

  — Cleveland Plain Dealer

• “Quiet and deeply introspective…Tender moments of observation, regret, and joy—all conveyed in un-self-consciously lyrical prose—result in a radiant meditation on identity, memory, and familial love and loss.”

  — Publishers Weekly

• “Will Collyer’s expressive performance portrays the spectrum of human emotion from youthful enthusiasm to hurt and baffled despair. His engaging portrayal carries the listener through the story…As a team, Gaige and Collyer draw a heartbreaking portrait of devoted fatherhood and impending loss. Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award.”

  — AudioFile

• “Gaige creates a fascinating and complex character in Erik, as he moves from the eccentric and slightly irresponsible father to a desperate man at the end of his rope…[An] expert exploration of the immigrant experience, alienation, and the unbreakable bond between parent and child.”

  — Booklist

• “Daring…A clean, suspenseful, economical story that is also a clever act of social commentary…As a case study of the unreliable narrator, Schroder is beautifully managed…Gaige…is an accomplished writer, and the novel elegantly navigates its ethical razor’s edge, bringing the reader along on a kind of joyride gone wrong…half sympathy-inducing mea culpa, half a bristling act of bravado and self-ignorance…Novelists like Gaige remind us that we live not in the age of the nineteenth-century marriage plot but in the era of the twenty-first century divorce plot…Gaige writes with a cool strangeness, a strong sense of style…Schroder is by turns dry, peculiar, expansive, and visionary.”

  — Bookforum

• “Amity Gaige has written a flawless book. It does not contain a single false note. Playful and inventive, Schrodermovingly depicts the ways we confound our own hearts—how even with the best intentions we fail to love those closest to us as well as we wish we could. Eric Schroder should take his place among the most charismatic and memorable characters in contemporary fiction, and Amity Gaige her place among the most talented and impressive writers working today.”

  — David Bezmozgis, prizewinning author

• Complicated and nuanced . . . the novel is absorbing, with a propulsive plot and a narrator who is charming, ambivalent, and searching-a man driven by love who understands that love cannot save him.

  — The New Yorker

• The measure of Gaige's great gifts as a storyteller is that she persuades you to believe in a situation that shouldn't be believable, and to love a narrator who shouldn't be lovable. Seldom has such a daring concept for a novel been grounded in such an appealing character.

  — Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom and The Corrections

• You will not want to put this book down. You will want to read it in one big gulp. This is a bullet of a novel, aimed at our pieties about parenthood and familial love. You won't soon forget Schroder or his daughter or the sentences that bring them to life. To those who know Gaige's first two novels, it's no surprise she's produced another stunner. To those who don't, you're in for a treat.

  — Adam Haslett, author of Union Atlantic, and the New York Times best-selling short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here

• The bitterness and disillusion of marriage have been thoroughly plumbed in contemporary fiction; Gaige is one of the rare novelists who is more interested in its potential for happiness and grace. A-.

  — Entertainment Weekly on The Folded World

• Love, marriage, and the whole damn thing-all spanned in a witty, tender first novel. With a flavor of Lorrie Moore, graceful, bright, modern writing.

  — Kirkus on O My Darling

• Utterly devourable...gently, and beautifully unfolds, like a gauzy curtain in an open window.

  — Los Angeles Times on O My Darling

• Sparkles and delights...crystalline insights into the nature of love and flashes of narrative brilliance.

  — Publisher's Weekly on O My Darling

• The Folded World will appeal to readers who like to dive into the muck of internal and interpersonal conflicts, and break the surface with breath born of insight and empathy. Amity Gaige's second novel lives up to the reputation she earned with her first one, as an original, compelling voice.

  — Chicago Tribune (Favorite Books of 2007)