In Bowlaway, death and love and dreams live together, squabbling, soothing, holding hands, full of resentment, affection and confusion, like members of a large, spirited, extended family. But McCracken’s ironic perspective, her humor and her deeply humane imagination never desert her. is jumpier, twitchier, a big book that veers in and out of the lives of its idiosyncratic characters, creating what McCracken calls a 'genealogy,' occasionally verging, in its bric-a-brac of historical oddball detail, on the precious. ‘A big, glorious novel in every sense, this sprawling family saga.is a funny and big-hearted epic from a seriously gifted wordsmith’Marie ClaireRead the sweeping and enchanting new novel from the author of The Giant’s HouseBertha is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts ever since she was discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery with nothing but a bowling ball, a. In a voice laced with insight and her signature sharp humor, Elizabeth McCracken has written an epic family saga set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America. McCracken refuses to distinguish between the absurdity of comedy and the absurdity of tragedy. Humor illuminates her work, revealing things clearly that we might have overlooked.

Always, though, shining through the carefully, beautifully painted grays, is the clarity of McCracken’s humor, bright and invigorating, like flickers of sunlight. Like a pinbody, Elizabeth McCracken steadies her constellation of characters, and readers watch as fate rolls their way, knocking them sideways, sending them flying into the gutters or skimming past them, missing them altogether.

Bowlaway a novel