"This book has the virtue of being the most perfect novel ever written. It manages to blend the miniature world of an uninteresting town with a profound reckoning with the human heart in all its vagaries. Here we find courage, pettiness, self-deception, love, profundity, triviality, sadness, joy, munificence, greed, theatricality, restraint, wit, pomposity, despair, hope. It’s seductively readable, free of pretension, and written with a rare clear-eyed kindness."

"One novel that I think will always be a personal favorite of mine is Room. The book is a force of nature: harrowing one moment, poignant the next. I can think of few books that so powerfully convey the lengths we will go to as parents to keep our children safe. And that voice? Brilliant. This is a book that gave me one whopper of an inferiority complex as a writer."

"This novel, based on the story of King Lear and set in an Iowa farming community in the late 1970s, has a phenomenal narrator. Ginny never betrays her voice; she’s initially naive and always straightforward. Yet she manages to drop deft charges of insight on virtually every page. A devastating and gorgeous account of fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, toxic masculinity, corrosive secrets…and an abiding heroine."

"The romance in this novel is so distinct, so interesting, and so surprising because it's so flawed. The couple — Dick and Nicole Diver — are gorgeous. You believe they're perfect, and then you find out that, in fact, they are deeply troubled — she especially. Dick rescues Nicole for a time, but he can't save her; she's too unstable. So they don't make it — they can't. It's an exquisite and unbearable love story."