PRAISE FOR MOTHEREST:
A DEFINING BOOK OF 2017, VIA THE WSJ
A BEST BOOK OF 2017 VIA ENTROPY
A BEST BOOK OF 2017 VIA PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
ONE OF 28 BOOKS YOU'LL WANT ON YOUR NIGHTSTAND, VIA SHONDALAND.COM: "Nostalgic, tender, and devastating"
THE NEW YORK TIMES CALLS MOTHEREST "A MOVING DEBUT" AND "FEARLESS"!!
LISTED IN VANITY FAIR'S "WHAT TO READ THIS MONTH"
ONE OF AUGUST'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS, VIA THE MILLIONS
THOUGHTFUL PROFILE IN THE WEEKEND WALL STREET JOURNAL! (paywalled, sorry)
LONG LIST FOR THE 2017 CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE!
STARRED REVIEW FROM KIRKUS! "A powerfully perceptive story [...] heartbreaking, hilarious, and poignant."
STARRED REVIEW FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY! "Iskandrian is a writer to watch."
BOOKLIST says: "Agnes’ voice, in her heartrending letters and her funny, sad, dead-true perceptions, propels Iskandrian’s brilliant debut about life’s continuously shifting, perplexing intimacies.”
"MOTHEREST is a moving story of loss and loneliness and parenthood and love, in all their vast human multitudes. It's an intensely perceptive and honest novel about the sometimes unbridgeable gap between parents and children. Kristen Iskandrian's narrator is an extraordinary character: a woman searching desperately for connection, an island trying to become a peninsula. You will want to yell at her, as I did, and you will want to cry with her, as I did, and you will be transfixed until the very last page."―Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Nix
"One of the most unforgettable protagonists I've read in recent years--as if a Dickens heroine was reimagined by a literary girl gang made up of Deb Olin Unferth, Katherine Dunn and Lydia Davis."―Porochista Khakpour, author of The Last Illusion
"Kristen Iskandrian is an utterly thrilling voice, and Motherest will slay you with its inventive, spiky, and heartrending investigation into the dark mysteries of family life - and the quest for a private identity within it. A smart, gorgeous, and singular debut."―Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me
"This is a book of wombs, physical and metaphorical, an exploration into the ways we make spaces to become ourselves - both divine and misguided - and what it means to be a daughter. Kristen Iskandrian's prose is both compulsively readable and structurally unique, investigating the mysteries of human feeling through a beautiful epistolary form."―Melissa Broder, author of So Sad Today
"I highly enjoyed Motherest—a powerful, moving, complex, wry, sensitive novel about crying, laughing, waiting, leaving, pain, loss, endurance, secrets, surprises, ambivalence, possession, parents, pregnancy, childbirth, college, home, and love."—Tao Lin, author of Taipei
"Kristen Iskandrian has done more than write a book: she's created a world. So particular and familiar is its setting (the '90s; college), so nuanced is its narrator (broken, whip-smart, wildly perceptive and yet frozen in her own fate), and so poignant is its writing (there are poems in these paragraphs!), you'll find yourself lingering in this world long after you've turned the last page. MOTHEREST is a fresh and devastating deep dive into womanhood, motherhood, teenagehood, and grief, and is an important reminder of the aches and wonders of being alive."—Molly Prentiss, author of Tuesday Nights in 1980
"Taut and tender, MOTHEREST one-ups the messy teenage page-turner, finding real human truths in its story of a vanished mother and a struggling daughter, a source for the sourceless longing of growing up."—Amelia Gray, author of Isadora
Available now.