A book I read only some years ago, and was astonished by its modernity, its formidable intelligence and its punk sensibility, was The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen

A strongly autobiographical portrait of a lost class marking out its final moments - every garden party, every house guest and every flirtation is touched by a sense of impending extinction

When I read [The Last September] I was knocked out by the sheer magnificence of her writing, the cinematic possibilities, and her obsession with the minutiae and the detail of life... I was totally gripped by the story

Posterity will one day return to Miss Bowen's novels as a repository of clues to the inner life of our times

A combination of social comedy and private tragedy...brilliant description of Anglo-Irish life at the troublesome time of 1920

She is a major writer; her name should appear on any responsible list of the ten most important fiction writers on this side of the Atlantic this century. She is what happened after Bloomsbury...the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark

Like Chekhov's plays about the dying years of Russian feudalism, The Last September captures the silliness, the snobbery, the perfect manners, the determination not to show their feelings, the denial, and the ending of the way of life of Bowen's circle

'The Last September catches the languid yet curiously valiant mode of life at the big house just as its demolition was at hand'

A haunting exploration of loneliness

Laura van den Berg is the best young writer in America

[Laura’s stories are ]… uniformly excellent - emotionally complex, very raw - but always with a mixture of pathos and humour that made me think of Lorrie Moore

Sad, eerie, smart, cynical and heartbreaking

This elegiac debut novel … lingers and aches in the memory

A must read

This is a thoughtful, touching story about survival—about finding ways to heal and reasons to live.

In understated prose, Laura creates Joy’s distorted and strange world. As we enter into that fictional world, we see that it reflects, in many ways, the real world where we find ourselves today. And in Joy’s loneliness and desire to connect, we recognize ourselves.

Marvellous

hauntingly beautiful . . . Don’t miss this remarkable book

steeped in the anxieties of our era

[a] brilliant and claustrophobic novel

one to watch out for

A very impressive, must read for fans of STATION ELEVEN, so unsettling but subtle too. I loved FIND ME…

a moving, and frequently funny, exploration of character and of trauma

so compelling ... an unforgettable debut

a wonderful read

Like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, van den Berg’s debut novel presents a frighteningly plausible near-future dystopia grounded in human elements… heartbreakingly real and compellingly wrought

Find Me, her transfixing first novel, is in keeping with her short stories thematically, and yet, in its deep soundings, it’s a commanding departure. . . Van den Berg’s enveloping novel of a plague and a seeker in an endangered world reveals what it feels like to grow up unwanted and unknown in a civilization hell-bent on self-destruction. It is also a beautifully strange, sad, and provocative inquiry into our failure to love, cherish, and protect. But ultimately, Find Me is a delving story of courage, persistence, and hope

In Find Me, van den Berg depicts a life slowly coming into focus—it’s blurry and impressionistic at times, sometimes deliriously scattered. But out of the fog of memory and the haze of drugs emerges a sense of clarity that’s deep and moving and real

From this memorable novel's eerie first paragraph to its enigmatic ending, Laura van den Berg has invented something beautiful indeed

This is one of my favorite novels of 2015, and we’re not even IN 2015 yet . . .The language is beautiful, spare, and carefully crafted, and the characters are fully realized and unforgettable. There is tension and redemption and insight and even humor in these pages, and they make for a really incredible read

Surreal adventures blend with a reflective and sad sensibility in van den Berg’s lyrical debut novel

Both novels offer precision of language and metaphor and scene even as what is being constructed feels messy, chaotic, sad, hopeless... Both orphaned and alone in the world, both so completely real, both telling a story that feels important and exciting to read. I feel lucky to have stumbled upon these books this year, and challenged by them to be better

This debut novel by acclaimed short story writer van den Berg tends to lean much closer to the realms of literary fiction with its complex psychology. . . Van den Berg's writing is curiously beautiful

a strange beauty in this apocalyptic tale