Description
WINNER OF THE 2021 CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE An Amazon Best Book of April 2021 Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021 by Oprah Magazine, The Week, The Millions, and Electric Lit. July 2021 Book of the Month for Roxane Gay's Book Club Longlisted for the PEN/ Hemingway Award It's Holy Week in the town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla is to play Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep. Vivid, darkly funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby's first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo's mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel's mother, whom Angel isn't speaking to; and Tio Tive, keeper of the family's history. In the absorbing, realist tradition of Elizabeth Strout and Jonathan Franzen, Kirstin Valdez Quade brings to life the struggles of her characters to parent children they may not be equipped to save.
From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel following one family's extraordinary year of love and sacrifice.
About the Author
Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of Night at the Fiestas, winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a '5 Under 35' award from the National Book Foundation, the Rome Prize, a Stegner Fellowship and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at Princeton University.
Reviews
An unputdownable novel, The Five Wounds takes my breath away with its intimate, humorous and heart-aching portrayal of a New Mexican family. Kirstin Valdez Quade can make a reader laugh and break a reader's heart in the same breath, and she leaves us, by the end of the novel, in awe of the dazzling power of her storytelling. -- Yiyun Li, author of Must I Go
The acclaimed author of Nights at the Fiestas returns with a gorgeously written, Franzen-caliber tale of one Latinx family's via dolorosa. * Oprah Magazine's Best Books of 2021 *
In this cruel and divisive era, Kirstin Valdez Quade has brought healing and regeneration with The Five Wounds. It is bracing and wise, and it breaks us in the best ways. Then builds back up again. It should find many grateful readers. -- Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Broken Angels
The characters in this engrossing novel are created in luminous and memorable detail. Just as the pacing is perfect, so too are the tact and care with which each scene is made. Kirstin Valdez Quade, by concentrating on the truth of small moments, has brought a whole world into focus. -- Colm Toibin, author of House of Names
Kirstin Valdez Quade writes with exquisite precision about the fragility and resilience of the Amadeo family. Valdez Quade is attentive to both the trembling shadows and epic crescendos of her characters' shared and private lives. I loved The Five Wounds, which reminded me that growing pains are not confined to adolescence, and that people can be newborn at any age. Even its most excruciating moments are charged with a luminous, pitiless compassion. -- Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
The Five Wounds is brilliant! The story is bountiful and so incredibly well crafted-a beautiful braid of the life-cycle within a family. It captures both the strength and fragility of relationships and existence and the resilience and great power of love and belief. It is a novel about faith in the largest sense of the word. Each page is packed with detail and the most beautiful language-and images and characters that will remain part of our lives. -- A. M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven
I don't remember ever reading a novel as vibrant and warm as The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade. Just a few pages in, I felt like I intimately knew the characters, and cared about them as if they family members. It's both heartbreaking and a joy to read! -- Lara Vapnyar, author of Divide Me by Zero
With deep empathy, fierce intelligence, and subtle wit, Kirstin Valdez Quade has crafted an indelible portrait of a family living in precarity. The characters in The Five Wounds are so vivid, their struggles, failures, and grasping efforts towards love and redemption so finely wrought, and each page full of such immaculate prose, that I read this novel with ever-increasing breathless urgency. -- Phil Klay, author of Redeployment
Book Information
ISBN 9781788168373
Author Kirstin Valdez Quade
Format Hardback
Page Count 432
Imprint Tuskar Rock
Publisher Profile Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 544g
Dimensions(mm) 222mm * 144mm * 38mm
From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel following one family's extraordinary year of love and sacrifice.
About the Author
Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of Night at the Fiestas, winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a '5 Under 35' award from the National Book Foundation, the Rome Prize, a Stegner Fellowship and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at Princeton University.
Reviews
An unputdownable novel, The Five Wounds takes my breath away with its intimate, humorous and heart-aching portrayal of a New Mexican family. Kirstin Valdez Quade can make a reader laugh and break a reader's heart in the same breath, and she leaves us, by the end of the novel, in awe of the dazzling power of her storytelling. -- Yiyun Li, author of Must I Go
The acclaimed author of Nights at the Fiestas returns with a gorgeously written, Franzen-caliber tale of one Latinx family's via dolorosa. * Oprah Magazine's Best Books of 2021 *
In this cruel and divisive era, Kirstin Valdez Quade has brought healing and regeneration with The Five Wounds. It is bracing and wise, and it breaks us in the best ways. Then builds back up again. It should find many grateful readers. -- Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Broken Angels
The characters in this engrossing novel are created in luminous and memorable detail. Just as the pacing is perfect, so too are the tact and care with which each scene is made. Kirstin Valdez Quade, by concentrating on the truth of small moments, has brought a whole world into focus. -- Colm Toibin, author of House of Names
Kirstin Valdez Quade writes with exquisite precision about the fragility and resilience of the Amadeo family. Valdez Quade is attentive to both the trembling shadows and epic crescendos of her characters' shared and private lives. I loved The Five Wounds, which reminded me that growing pains are not confined to adolescence, and that people can be newborn at any age. Even its most excruciating moments are charged with a luminous, pitiless compassion. -- Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
The Five Wounds is brilliant! The story is bountiful and so incredibly well crafted-a beautiful braid of the life-cycle within a family. It captures both the strength and fragility of relationships and existence and the resilience and great power of love and belief. It is a novel about faith in the largest sense of the word. Each page is packed with detail and the most beautiful language-and images and characters that will remain part of our lives. -- A. M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven
I don't remember ever reading a novel as vibrant and warm as The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade. Just a few pages in, I felt like I intimately knew the characters, and cared about them as if they family members. It's both heartbreaking and a joy to read! -- Lara Vapnyar, author of Divide Me by Zero
With deep empathy, fierce intelligence, and subtle wit, Kirstin Valdez Quade has crafted an indelible portrait of a family living in precarity. The characters in The Five Wounds are so vivid, their struggles, failures, and grasping efforts towards love and redemption so finely wrought, and each page full of such immaculate prose, that I read this novel with ever-increasing breathless urgency. -- Phil Klay, author of Redeployment
Book Information
ISBN 9781788168373
Author Kirstin Valdez Quade
Format Hardback
Page Count 432
Imprint Tuskar Rock
Publisher Profile Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 544g
Dimensions(mm) 222mm * 144mm * 38mm
