Praise
| Awards | National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship 2002 nomination for a National Book Award |
DEAR MONEY
| Kirkus Reviews Click here for full praise |
Martha McPhee’s fourth novel wouldn’t be so funny if it didn’t ring so true. As the narrator of Dear Money, India Palmer has published four novels, none of which has sold more than 5,000 copies, and has written a fifth, which she had “come to hope…would be the winning ticket in the literary lottery where art met commerce.”
Though it would be a mistake to reduce India to an authorial stand-in, the delicious irony of McPhee’s novel is that it deserves to be her own lottery winner, the breakout book thatattracts a popular readership exceeding those drawn by the critical notices and prize nominations for her earlier work. |
L’AMERICA
| The New York Times | Surely by now some clever scientist has studied the similarities between the human brain in the throes of new love and the human brain while vacationing in a picturesque foreign country. Doesn’t it seem likely that whatever chemical causing the rapture we feel after that first, fantastic kiss is the same one making us swear we’ve never tasted an espresso as good as the one in this little Roman cafe? The sequence is the same, whether we’ve fallen hard for a place or a person: astonishment (I’ve never felt this way before); followed by euphoria (everything looks, tastes, smells and sounds so much better than it did yesterday); followed, typically, by a kind of naïve determinism (this was simply meant to be, and it would be wrong, cosmically wrong, not to rearrange my life to make this a major part of it)…. |
| The New York Times | “Ms. McPhee does a credible job of conjuring the ardor that Beth and Cesare feel for each other: that mix of physical attraction, emotional chemistry and inexplicable magic that can act as a magnet, pulling two people together across time and space.” |
| The New York Times Book Review | “Beth walk[s] in the footsetps of Daisy Miller and Isabel rcher. McPhee has plenty of fun updating Jamesian tensions for the NATO era.” |
| The Washington Times | “The story unfolds with the impressionistic randomness of memory. The contrasting of American and Old World viewpoints through repeated layers of telling and detail is the novel’s primary satisfaction.” |
| Los Angeles Time | “Captures the headlong energy of falling in love for the first time and discovering a sensual culture. A transcendent ending.” |
| The Seattle Times | “L’America leaves trails of vividly seductive prose…[and] evokes the exhilarating incendiary first love.” |
| Minneapolis Star Tribune | “An unabashedly romantic and readable epic of doomed love. A lovely, lyrically spun story.” |
| Newark Star-Ledger | “McPhee’s latest novel makes sparks fly for nearly 300 pages. She eloquently re-creates that ineffable sense of loss and longing at the heart of all great affairs.” |
| San Francisco Chronicle | “McPhee..beautifully and hauntingly limns the impact the impact of worldviews at odds.” |
| Harvard Book Review | “At its core, L’America is as much an exploration of the turns of fate that shape its protagonists’ lives as it is a study of the ways in which these lives are predetermined by the history that precedes them. Far from a literary behemoth, the novel is a quiet, scenic portrayal of life simply being lived. Its progress runs alongside that of its characters, characters who “[greet] each other with smiles and stories of their tangled dramas as they have for so many years and generations, same as they do everywhere, ordinary people engaged in ordinary lives that amount to everything…” |
| The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, VA) | “An epic love story. McPhee’s prose oozes with sensuality…every word is gorgeous and intentional and visceral. A phenomenal read from start to finish.” |
| Harper’s Bazaar | “Romance rules in L’America.” |
| More Magazine | “McPhee’s unflinching gaze follows [this] cross-cultural affair to its poignant end.” |
| Booklist (starred review) | “A sensuous and finely modulated tale about wandering and rootedness, desire and destiny. McPhee dramatizes cultural contrasts, the unending repercussions of first love, the gradual metamorphosis of the self, the erotics of heartbreak, and the consolation of beauty.” |
| Library Journal (starred review) | “[This] is the sort of smart, passionate, all-consuming, impossible love affair that is both breathtakingly sensual, shockingly selfish, and finally, bafflingly cruel. McPhee draws the reader into the lives of this irresistibly spirited, intensely determined couple.” |
| Book Sense Bestseller List (recommended) | “This story of an American and an Italian who meets on a small Aegean island is a novel rich for the senses.” |
| Publisher’s Weekly | “A rapturous but socially acute fable of cross-class love. McPhee’s lush, erotically charged prose evokes their erotic obsession—and the glamorous Old World locales where it blossoms.” |
| Bookmarks Magazine | “Like Henry James, McPhee…asks big questions about European tradition and American ‘newness,’ while offering an absorbing account of first love.” |
| Pages Magazine | “A heartbreaking and transformative love story.” |
| Curled Up | When Beth and Cesare meet one untroubled summer on the small Greek Island of Paros “floating in the Aegean like a song,” they begin an affair that will last for more than two decades. The attraction is instant, the love between them a formidable force, “the draw, the pull, the urgency behind the love – the desire to conquer the impossible.” The blond-haired, blue-eyed Beth is only eighteen years old when she meets the dark, swarthy Cesare on some steps leading up to a whitewashed pensione. His eyes lock onto hers for an instant only, but long enough for her to feel a shock and a stab – “and then nothing was the same….” |
| Laura Fraser, author of An Italian Affair | “Anyone who had ever traveed to a foreign country and fall in love—with the country or a person—will relishL’America. I never wanted it to end.” |
GORGEOUS LIES
NOMINATED FOR A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
| The New York TimesClick here for full praise |
Martha McPhee’s elegantly written first novel, ”Bright Angel Time” (1997), was a road story with a difference. The narrator, Kate Cooper, recounted her experiences at the age of 8, when her mother, Eve, newly abandoned by her husband, hooked up with an itinerant Gestalt therapist named Anton Furey. It was 1970, and Anton, a former Jesuit from Texas who was ”writing the definitive treatise on the psychology of love,” introduced Eve and her three daughters to ”a new life on the road with his kids, in a turquoise camper….” |
| Los Angeles Times Book Review | “[McPhee] avoids the extremes of hippie nostalgia and conservative revisionism and doesn’t provide simple answers. Her prose captures the Chardin mood: Elegant and airy, it seems to levitate even the grubbiest details.” |
| The Washington Post Bookworld | “The greatest strength of Gorgeous Lies is in its multiplicity of perspectives…It’s easy to see why the charismatic figures from BAT will not loosen their grip on this author. |
| Santa Fe New Mexican | “Some sentenceas bulge with lyric images while others are blunt with resentment, wielded like weapons. When McPhee strikes the right rhythem you don’t so much read her prose as live inside it.” |
| Times Union (Albany NY) | “McPhee bring sensitivity and insight to her account…She is an immensely gifted novelist.” |
| The Dallas Morning News | “Deftly depicts individuals dealing with old memories and new problems.” |
| O MagazineClick here for full praise | In Martha McPhee’s Gorgeous Lies (Harcourt), Anton Furey (of McPhee’s acclaimed first novel, Bright Angel Time) is the dying patriarch of a household that includes his own five children by his first wife, his second wife’s three children, and the daughter they have together. Now adults, the Furey-Cooper progeny adore the charismatic Anton, who has molded them into his idea of the perfect American family: intellectually adventurous, spiritually enlightened, emotionally secure…. |
| O Magazine | “An unusually strong novel [that] explores the wild frontier of domestic life.” |
| Elle | “McPee is a sensuous stylist” |
| Kirkus Reviews(starred) | “Fine work: a moving portrait of a foolish, full-hearted but impossibly innocent man.” |
| Larry McMurtry | “Gorgeous Lies is a lovely meditation on mortality…brilliantly and convincingly done.” |
| Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried | “I loved this book. A genuine work of art…And Martha McPhee plainly ranks as one of our country’s best young writers.” |
BRIGHT ANGEL TIME
| The New York Times | “To get a sense of what Martha McPhee’s affecting first novel is like, imagine ”Rabbit Run” or ”Revolutionary Road” written from the point of view of an 8-year-old child, witness to the dissolution of her parents’ marriage. Imagine this same precocious girl privy to the hippie shenanigans of ”The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and committed to setting down her observations in clear-eyed prose….” |
| The New York Post | “[An] emotionally charged, beautifully written first novel…A tight, emotionally urgent, polished account of familial meltdown…The author plays a game of trust with the past, falling backwards in time, painting a coarse memories beautifully, and finding beauty where it’s fleeting and scarce.” |
| The Cleveland Plain Dealer | “Told with great verve and poetic sweep, Bright Angel Time is a wise, pointed, utterly absorbing childhood narrative—honest, and above all, original.” |
| US | “Gorgeous…The voice of the young narrator trying to find her center is compelling and lucid In this well-rendered tale of misplaced dreams and forgotten realities, McPhee’s prose is as delicate and lovely as an angel’s wing.” |
| People | “This is an original, particularly American story of a family unhappy in its own way…McPhee writes with assurance in her first novel. Her story flows smoothly, and she dissects her characters kindly.” |
| Newsweek | “Bright Angel Time is a gorgeous novel with subtle things to say about America in the wake of the first divorce boom…McPhee writes such lovely sentences that you want to do more than just underline them: you want to cut them out.” |
| Time | “[A] funny and acerbic family novel.” |
| Glamour | “Full of beautiful writing and dead-on observations about the era that spawned broken families and broken hearts—and shot through with an aching sense of dislocation and adolescent rebellion—McPhee’s saga will haunt anyone who has ever felt lost on even the firmest ground.” |
| Mirabella | “If you’re looking for a fresh voice, try Martha McPhee’s first novel, Bright Angel Time, as told by a whip-smart eight-year-old.” |
| Salon.comClick here for full praise | “In her first novel, Bright Angel Time (Harcourt Brace), Martha McPhee captures the era when women’s liberation mixed with notions of free love led to sexual license, and Gestalt therapy promised enlightenment. Seen through the eyes of eight-year-old Kate and her two sisters, this is not so much a time of freedom as one of confusion, adult carelessness, and neglect. Kate’s steely-eyed view of her parents’ world, combined with McPhee’s brilliant imagery and deft characterization, makes this ’70s-era tale a book for the ’90s….” |
| BellaOnlineClick here for full praise | “The novel centers on 8 year old Kate, her 10 and 12 year old sisters, and their divorced mother Eve reeling from her failed marriage Eve, falls for Anton— the complete opposite of her ex. Robbed of her comfortable lifestyle, Eve takes her girls and joins Anton and his kids on the road in a turquoise camper. As 8 year old Kate explains, “It’s the 70’s you could do that….” |
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Forthcoming June 2010 Available for pre-order at:
Amazon, Borders, and Indie Bound -
Dear Money Book Trailer
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Notes from Martha-
Brilliant blog. You have won a recent regular reader. Please maintain the nice posts and I look forward to more of your newsworthy posts.
Thank you so much for writing. I am delighted.