Description

In a Perfect World is critically acclaimed writer Laura Kasischke’s new novel of marriage, motherhood, and the choices we make when we have no choices left. Kasischke, the author of The Life Before Her Eyes, tells the story of Jiselle, a young flight attendant who’s just settled into a fairy tale life with her new husband and stepchildren. But as a mysterious new illness spreads rapidly throughout the country, she begins to realize that her marriage, her stepchildren, and their perfect world are all in terrible danger . . .

About the author(s)

Laura Kasischke teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, she has published eight collections of poetry and ten novels, three of which have been made into films, including The Life Before Her Eyes.

Reviews

“It is not enough to say that Kasischke’s language is ‘poetic,’ a word that has come to mean ‘pretty.’ Rather, her writing does what good poetry does—it shows us an alternate world and lulls us into living in it. . . . [T]he language catapults us into another plane of existence, one of facade and reflection.” - New York Times Book Review

“Kasischke’s verses walk that perfect Plathian line between the everyday—making macaroni and cheese, getting pulled over for speeding—and the eternal, the plainspoken and the lyrical, the comfortable and the abyss of loss that lies just beneath it.” - Time magazine

“From its haunting opening image to its riveting end, this is a tale of beauty, resilience, love, sacrifice, and even grace found in the most unlikely of places. In a truly ‘perfect world’ every book I read would inspire me like this one.” - Katrina Kittle, author of The Kindness of Strangers

“IN A PERFECT WORLD reveals astonishing and tender insight into human nature while exposing a terrifying, yet believable, world I’d never before imagined. This story will grasp onto your heart before swiftly carrying you away.” - Jessica Anya Blau, author of The Summer of Naked Swim Parties

“[Kasischke]writes with worldly-wise profundity and sudden beauty but also sly humor . . .We’re helplessly drawn in by a slew of burning questions, with this one foremost: When can we expect a sequel…or is that nothing but a doomed hope?” - Elle

“Kasischke finds beauty amid the apocalypse in her timely seventh novel . . . Startling, sometimes violent images combine with strikingly dispassionate narration to create a fictional world where terror, beauty and chaos walk hand in hand.” - Publishers Weekly

“This is a doomsday book in the form of a finely observed domestic drama, showing how dysfunctional relationships shift and soften in response to the looming menace . . . The reader may well come away with the odd, exhilarating feeling that a spell has both been cast and broken.” - Los Angeles Times

More by Laura Kasischke

More Literary

More Fiction

More Marriage & Divorce

More Family Life

More Women

More American

More World Literature

More Contemporary

More Romance

More Fantasy

More New Adult

More Coming of Age

More Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic

More Science Fiction

More American

More Drama