"When I was 12, I spent three weeks isolated on the island of Sardinia with my father and his young family. I found a copy of Clavell on the bookshelf in the home that we were renting and it saved me. Historical fiction became a lifelong love, and James Clavell a guide."

"As in all of Yates’s books, the characters are modeled after people in his life, and this book is primarily about his mother. It’s like August: Osage County, if it were set on Long Island in the 1930s. The story may be bleak and hopeless, but Yates’s prose is unpretentious and irresistible."

"I’ve been fascinated by Frankie, the heroine of the book, ever since I was 14. McCullers really captures adolescence and, as Frankie puts it, that feeling of being “an unjoined person.” I would imagine on a desert island, I might want to be able to articulate those feelings of longing to belong."

"I adore Henry James and yet freely admit to never having made it all the way through this one. I have a strong suspicion something truly critical to my life lies in the last 50 pages, and if I were alone with it on a desert island, I would finally find out."