Schroder: A Novel - Tapa dura

"Complicated and nuanced . . . the novel is absorbing, with a propulsive plot and a narrator who is charming, ambivalent, and searching-a man driven by love who understands that love cannot save him."--The New Yorker

"Daring...a clean, suspenseful, economical story that is also a clever act of social commentary...As a case study of the unreliable narrator, SCHRODER is beautifully managed...Gaige...is an accomplished writer, and the novel elegantly navigates its ethical razor's edge, brining the reader along on a kind of joyride gone wrong...half sympathy-inducing mea culpa, half a bristling act of bravado and self-ignorance...Novelists like Gaige remind us that we live not in the age of the nineteenth-century marriage plot but in the era of the twenty-first century divorce plot...Gaige writes with a cool strangeness, a strong sense of style...Schroder is by turns dry, peculiar, expansive, and visionary."--Meghan O'Rourke, Bookforum

"On occasion... a novel will provoke a host of tangled and disconcertingly conflicted reactions-revulsion and affection; blame and understanding; a connection that goes beyond surface sympathy to a deeper, and possibly unwanted, emotional recognition. These were among the things I experienced while reading Amity Gaige's astoundingly good novel SCHRODER."--The Wall Street Journal

"Agile. . . transporting . . . a book that works as both character study and morality play, filled with questions that have no easy answers."--Janet Maslin, New York Times

"Gaige's spot-on prose makes this quirky parental drama irresistible."--Good Housekeeping

"Strikingly original."--Reader's Digest

"A lyrical and poetic novel about the adverse ramifications of a little white lie that follows its teller throughout his life."--O, The Oprah Magazine

"In SCHRODER, Amity Gaige explores the rich, murky realm where parental devotion edges into mania, and logic crabwalks into crime. This offbeat, exquisitely written novel showcases a fresh, forceful young voice in American letters."--Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad

"Amity Gaige has written a flawless book. It does not contain a single false note. Playful and inventive, SCHRODER movingly depicts the ways we confound our own hearts--how even with the best intentions, we fail to love those closest to us as well as we wish we could. Eric Schroder should take his place among the most charismatic and memorable characters in contemporary fiction, and Amity Gaige her place among the most talented and impressive writers working today."
--David Bezmozgis, prize-winning author of Natasha and Other Stories and The Free World

"You will not want to put this book down. You will want to read it in one big gulp. This is a bullet of a novel, aimed at our pieties about parenthood and familial love. You won't soon forget Schroder or his daughter or the sentences that bring them to life. To those who know Gaige's first two novels, it's no surprise she's produced another stunner. To those who don't, you're in for a treat."--Adam Haslett, author of Union Atlantic, and the New York Times best-selling short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here

Attending summer camp as a boy, Erik Schroder-- a first generation East German immigrant--adopts the name of Eric Kennedy, a decision that will set him on an improbable and transformative journey. SCHRODER relates the story of how years later, Erik finds himself on an urgent escape to Lake Champlain, Vermont with his daughter, hiding from authorities amidst a heated custody battle with estranged wife, Laura, who is unaware of his previous identity. From a correctional facility, Erik surveys the course of his life: his love for Laura, his childhood, his experience as a father. In this way, this sweeping and deftly-imagined novel is an exploration of the identities we take on in our lives-those we are born with, and those we construct for ourselves.