The First Desire: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• “Nancy Reisman has written a book in which the sentences are so lush, the characters are so vivid, and the story is so compelling, I felt I had stepped inside the world she created and had taken up residence. I want to tell you how much I loved it there. The First Desire is not a book to be merely read. It is a book to be lived.”

  — Ann Patchett, New York Times author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto

• “Reisman’s hypnotic prose makes her…characters live. And her sympathy and wealth of detail make the Cohens’ world our own: specific, inescapably flawed, unpredictably meaningful, and very, very real.”

  — People

• “A book of rhythms and reveries…Rich in atmosphere…The First Desire is a mystery story, left unsolved because the mystery is identity itself.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “Accomplished…Reisman’s sumptuous prose, and her canny knowledge of the corrosive ways an average family can come apart, make The First Desire a lovely, absorbing companion.”

  — Entertainment Weekly (reader’s choice)

• “A superb new writer…Reisman, whose sensually charged, often outright stunning style strongly evokes Virginia Woolf…proves herself a rare master of internal drama, able to isolate the moment that effects a sea change within a lifetime of compromise.”

  — Vogue

• “A continuing testament to the paradoxical ease with which family ties unravel…Intensely affecting and thought-provoking.”

  — Washington Post Book World

• “A debut of luminous, distinctive quality…This is a writer quietly taking her own bold course, and to travel with her as she does is a joy.”

  — Boston Globe

• “A triumph…[Reisman] proves herself Virginia Woolf’s equal in sketching how interior vistas can collide with exterior limits in women’s lives. The First Desire is a marvelous testament to how family can both sustain and destroy us, a delicate dance through the family minefields, written in language both limpid and wise…We will not have room to say enough [about] the wonder of Reisman’s prose.”

  — Detroit Free Press

• “Intense and moving…Aside from the grace of the writing, The First Desire astonishes most in the intimacy it grants us with five fully realized characters.”

  — Atlanta Journal-Constitution

• “Haunting…Reisman’s genius [is having] produced a book that generates its own world and holds the reader captive, willingly, to its landscape. Reisman creates this miracle through the power of her writing.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle