"My favorite part of this novel is how the main character is so fixated on re-creating a very specific scene from his past, and he's not even sure why. It's an act of theater, and memory, and something powerfully unconscious — and we are witness to the process. He is a kind of inverted Proust, making the madeleine from scratch to evoke the thing you didn't know needed evoking."

"The first novel I read that held together on a regular plane as well as thematic one - as story as well as a symbolic journey. There could be others that work like Jude, but something about this book - the way the author is dealing with ideas like evolution along with the collapse of class culture - made it feel like a precursor to modernism. Like the birth of modernism."

"I read this when my first boyfriend broke up with me and wept across three continents—weeping seems to be a theme today. The protagonist is one of those assholes who thinks he’s going to ‘save’ a sex worker (the politics are rough), but the obsession and abandonment shit is on point. Then I bragged to my college English teacher and he was like ‘oh, that’s a lesser British novel.’ Whoops!"

"Reading this novel is like going back to a life I didn't have, but one that feels eerily familiar, as a teenager in high school. There's such a force in her writing, which is the force of Novak—she looks like a sweet person on the outside, which she is, but inside she is a tornado of passion and strength enough to crush the planet with her pinky finger."

"You know summer has officially arrived when you are absorbed in a Mary Kay Andrews novel. In this layered and captivating story, the down-on-her-luck heroine, Drue, takes a job from her estranged father in St. Petersburg. What she discovers working at his law firm reveals a mystery that Drue is bent on solving. One part mystery, one part romance, Sunset Beach is an absolute delight."