Pearl

Praise

A New York Times Summer Reading List Recommendation

“A beautiful tale of sadness and enduring love…. that feels like a modern fairy tale…. Pearl is a masterful novel, shot through with legend and song. It can be read on many levels: as a mystery, as a story of grief and healing, as a response to a poem. But most of all, it can be read as a story of love.”—Laurie Hertzel, The Boston Globe

“Pearl is a gorgeous, swirling, haunted and haunting potion of a book. It embodies like no other the truth that every absence is as singular and elaborate and mysterious as the presence of the thing—or person—it describes, no matter how back to front, inside out, lucidly or ethereally memories of its particulars may come and go. How utterly moving, to be under its beautiful, artful spell.” —Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers and This Other Eden

“Pearl, an exceptional debut novel, is both a mystery story and a meditation on grief, abandonment and consolation, evoking the profundities of the haunting medieval poem… It’s a book that will be passed from hand to hand for a long time to come.” — The Booker Prize 2023 judges

“[A] gorgeous novel…. Marianne sees her grief and love reflected in the preserved, 14th-century lines [of the poem Pearl]…. Hughes’s placid and deep novel chains sorrows to each other as the narrative unfurls, creating a delicate tether connecting moments of loss.”—Literary Hub

“Hughes, who is a poet herself, brings an attention to language and to the natural world that lends a beautiful vibrancy to her sentences…. [And h]umor brightens grief-filled and difficult moments… Pearl is also full of the gentle landscape and hallowed folklore of English village life, sometimes with a slightly gothic cast….[A] tender debut novel”—BookPage, starred review

“Compulsive and wonderfully written, Pearl is a small gem.” —The Times Literary Supplement

“The prose has a bubbling verve that is deeply appealing.”— The Financial Times

“A really beautiful story…. It’s a special book.”—The New York Times Book Review podcast