Very Cold People

“Though dealing with life’s ugly, messy truths, her writing is compact and beautiful. So masterly is Manguso at making beauty of boring old daily pain. . . [the book is] a compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived. . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.”—The New York Times

“Reading Manguso is like watching someone skin an animal, slice its throat and drain its blood, preparing it quickly and efficiently for consumption. You wonder, reading her succinct and devastating sentences, just what she had to do to get there.”—Los Angeles Times

“[Manguso] belongs to a cohort of minimalist, stream-of-consciousness writers—Jenny Offill, Sheila Heti, Eula Biss—whose texts work out the equations of domestic life and creative ambition.”—New Yorker

“A searing catalogue of pinched bitterness . . . But with her gemlike apercus, Manguso renders this bleakness oddly fascinating.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine

“A chilling first novel . . . This coming-of-age story offers a stark take on what it is to feel poor, poorly nurtured, and inadequately loved in a class-conscious, lily-white town….Very Cold People does what we ask of good literature: It absorbs our attention and stirs empathy and reflection.”—NPR

“In this carefully constructed novel, the pervasive cold is as human as it is meteorological. Manguso is an exquisitely astute writer.”—Boston Globe

“With glacial precision and mordant wit, Manguso delineates a milieu in which class and gender get silenced by lip service to the American dream. Very Cold People feels monumental: an icy cenotaph for a not-so-distant past.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[Manguso’s] prose is, like a red wine reduction, boiled down to its most potent iteration, It’s all killer, no filler with Manguso.”—AV Club

“Breathtakingly well-written.”—Shelf Awareness

“Sarah Manguso is one of the most original and exciting writers working in English today. Every word feels necessary, and she’s redefining genre as she goes.”—Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies

“Very Cold People knocked me to my knees. So precise, so austere, so elegant, this story is devastatingly familiar to those of us who know the loneliness of growing up in a place of extreme emotional restraint.”—Lauren Groff, author of Florida

“A haunted masterpiece, written with the precision of a miniaturist and the vulnerability of true heartache. I wept more than once; I recognized myself more than once. Very Cold People proves yet again that Manguso is one of the greats.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less

“I loved every sentence, thought, and gesture in this perfect novel. Sarah Manguso has painted a deeply moving portrait of the stark unreality of childhood.”—Catherine Lacey, author of Pew

“A poignant and unnerving masterwork about growing up in a dominator society, told with the concision, carefulness, and sense of mystery that we’ve come to expect from Sarah Manguso.”—Tao Lin, author of Leave Society

“Manguso is a lovely writer about unlovely things. . . . A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)