Testimonials
” Spellbinding…. Hill writes with great elegance, clarity, and soul.
- The Paris Review
” In this multi-faceted gem of a book, Kathleen Hill, a great reader, pays tribute to the masterworks of literature which have inspired her, and uses her prodigious memory and her lucid prose style to celebrate love and compassion as the most noble and enduring of human qualities.
- Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn and House of Names
” In these gorgeous pages Kathleen Hill explores her own life, and the lives of family and friends, in the company of various novels. The result is a memoir filled with urgency as she struggles to read the world around her, to understand herself, and others, as deeply as Isabel Archer and Lucy Gayheart. This is a wonderful and profound book.
- Margot Livesey, author of Mercury: A Novel
” We’ve always believed that books were like a soundtrack to our lives and that our day-to-day lives stood in the foreground. But this stunning book tells a different and surprising tale: It is our lives that slip into the background, and books —those fabulous books that alter who we are—can become the real face of our lives.
- Andre Aciman, author of Out of Egypt and Call Me By Your Name
” Here is a book that takes up beauty, longing, genius, and spirit—here is solitary thought, not looking to be answered, even by the thinker: an original book that leaves the reader less alone.
- Jean Valentine, poet, author of Break the Glass
” What a delight this is! Hill captures precisely, beautifully, the tremor of a great book crossing our lives at just the right moment.
- Andrea Barrett, author of Archangel and The Voyage of the Narwhal
” Eloquent and searching, Hill’s book explores the strange and wondrous resonances between the read and lived while celebrating reading itself as among the most profoundly transformative of human acts. A thought-provoking memoir about the significance of literature in life.
- Kirkus Reviews