Praise for Inverno
"A beautiful, tricky, compressed gem of a book that seems determined to upend your expectations of it . . . Though Inverno is Zarin's first novel, it carries the grace and intellectual heft of her decades as a poet . . . Its stream-of-consciousness narration evokes Virginia Woolf or Italo Calvino." –Mark Athitakis, The Washington Post
"
Zarin's point, perhaps, is that life-changing love affairs mushroom out beyond the moments spent together. Full of gorgeous descriptions, fascinating characters, and impressive allusions to fairy tales, Robert Redford movies, Girl Scouts, Blondie, and more
, Inverno is intellectual, acrobatic, and fascinating." –Annie Tully,
Booklist "A sly and beguiling love story doubling as a meditation on the nature of time . . . [A] lovely exploration of the limits of love and the unlimited scope of memory and imagination." –
Publishers Weekly "Zarin's
mesmerizing voice (could anyone else dedicate a full page to the sensuous nature of the black rotary telephone?)
ensnares the imagination to the point where readers will be happy to imagine the plot that suits them best . . . [
Inverno] will thrill those who revel in intoxicating language." –
Library Journal "
A brilliant incantation to undying love, where love is a promise that time can't keep but cannot break. Love does not heal, is not muted by regrets, shame, or denial, and is forever revived where we wanted it chilled and dead.
To use Cynthia Zarin's word, love annihilates." –
André Aciman, author of
Call Me by Your Name "
Haunting, elegant, driven through with yearning and simmering tension: this is a
beautifully evocative reckoning with the memories, repetitions and fictions that form our lives." –
Francesca Wade, author of
Square Haunting: Five Women Writers in London Between the Wars "Cynthia Zarin's
Inverno is
a dazzlingly beautiful, heartbreaking invocation of love, life, and the infinite ways in which the two intersect.
Writers capable of producing fabulous prose are rare. Writers who bring a laser-sharp eye to the complexities of living in the world among others, and to the various collisions of past and present, are rare as well. A writer like Zarin, who can do both, is the rarest of all.
I loved every line in this book." –
Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
The Hours and
A Wild Swan and Other Tales Praise for
Cynthia Zarin "There were moments throughout
An Enlarged Heart that
reminded me of Didion at her elegiac best, which is perhaps the finest compliment I know how to pay an essayist." –Christopher Beha,
The New York Times "Zarin knits her stories together with
an appealing and deeply intimate voice." –Suzanne Koven,
The Boston Globe
