[A] brilliant exploration of what it means to grow up.—Electric Literature
In stark and subtle prose, [Chambers] flushes out present-day male loneliness from the places it hides: alcoholism, nomadism, and persistent fixations on long-ago romances.—Booklist, Starred Review
A master grasp on language and movement…. a gift of breathtaking prose brimming with empathy and soul.—Debutiful, Best Book of the Month
Tender and taut…. offers a message about love, loneliness, and the inescapable fervor of war that never ceases to resonate…. Remarkable.—Chicago Review of Books, Best Book of the Month
Grady Chambers, poet, has written a tender, beautifully observed debut novel, an empathic recollection of becoming, of love and what it is made of. In Chambers’ kind voice is wonder at it all. Great Disasters is great fiction.
—Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood
Great Disasters is an elegiac and moving first novel. Chambers writes beautiful, precise prose that carefully narrates the story of his characters’ high school years: reckless and callow, but also formative and tender. With great compassion and an evocative sense of place and history, Chambers captures the intricate ways adulthood is shaped by the long shadows of adolescence.
—Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward
Great Disasters is at once earnestly old-fashioned and quietly contemporary. Its narrator’s account of his cohort of mostly privileged Chicago boys as willfully unselfconscious drinkers from middle school to middle age seems to track America’s own dismal arc from 9/11 to the ascension of Trump. But the narrator’s focus, for better and for worse, is always himself: his fears and sadnesses regarding his own meekness and inauthenticity, and the distance he maintains from those he claims to cherish. Even so, in his attempt to parse the past and face the truth he reminds us how much is available to us, if we only have the courage to choose it.
—Jim Shepard, author of Phase Six
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