It Will End with Us

Winner of the O. Henry Prize for Cigarettes Newsweek's Favorite Books of 2014 Included in Library Journal's 25 Key Indie Fiction Titles, Fall 2014-Winter 2015 Reading the novel can feel like admiring dewdrops on a spider's web, each paragraph and sentence glittering exquisitely. . . . Savage's is a book of the heart as much as the head. Which is itself an accomplishment of no small note: to recognize the arbitrary, degraded thing that is memory, and allow it its loveliness for all of that. -New York Times Sunday Book Review If the world-all its hysteric noise-was muted for just one minute, Sam Savage is what you might be fortunate enough to hear. His elegant laconism, his leaps across the self-evident, his soft aplomb, and the rarified air he bestows upon the mundane make him the only American writer worthy of the label the true eccentric. -Valeria Luiselli A Southern childhood in duskier, Tennessee Williams times, offering an aphoristic scattering of memories-one- and two-sentence stand-alones that spill isolated down the page like little gems . . . showing us how memory works and how we make sense of our lives, drip by drip and sensation by sensation. -Library Journal Savage's lean, meditative novels, so meticulously pitched and poised, eschew the bloated excess and garish dazzle that can mar those from writers half his age. . . . In Savage's novel, or Eve's 'inventory of tiny things,' it is the small, fleeting and quiet details that speak volumes. -Star Tribune To call the book a novel, however, fails to acknowledge the poetry in its form. -Carolina Quarterly Savage constructs novel from scattered memories. -Wisconsin State Journal Sam Savage, once more, elicits our admiration and aesthetic appreciation for reminding us not to be complacent, and to interrogate what Eve terms the 'inner reaches'-our inner selves-and what we believe, in a compact with others, to be the real world. -Numero Cinq A small book that tells a huge story about a Southern woman's memories of her mother and a vanishing world. -Shelf Awareness The narrative perfectly replicates the capriciousness of memory. -AskMen.com A novel written in a most unusual way: a series of brief paragraphs which sometimes read like diary entries, other times like descriptions from a book of recollections. The mosaic effect is enhanced by the author's skillful use of language, his vivid, poetically-charged prose style. -Lively Arts As Savage indicates with philosophical acumen . . . the private symbol is a myth. -Schooner Sam Savage manages to be both artful and literal-minded in this faux autobiographical tale of childhood and a mother afflicted and finally driven mad by her wish for artistic success. Savage writes knowingly about the uncertainties of childhood memory, but creates a convincing world of sibling combat and adult pretension. A wonderful, absorbing novel. -C. Michael Curtis, Fiction Editor, The Atlantic Monthly Savage's stylistic movements around structure and prose helps texture this narrative and make the emotional vulnerability of Eve even more resonating. . . It Will End with Us is a beautiful portrait of a woman who attempts to recreate what she has left by meditating on images. -Online Sundries There's a vividness to these false memories; even those scraps battered 'beyond recognition' shine with a light of their own. -Wisconsin State Journal