Description
"I can imagine both Jane Austen and Raymond Carver pouring over this masterly novel" of a girl's coming-of-age in 1970s New York (Frank McCourt).From the National Endowment for the Arts Award-winning author of the
New York Times Notable Book,
The Sea of Trees, comes the "shockingly funny" (
Vanity Fair), "wholly unsentimental but peculiarly hopeful portrait of family love and growing up scarred but sturdy" (
LA Weekly).
Splitting time between her off-kilter family in a garbage-strewn apartment and a lonely hot dog vendor who trades Hershey bars for questionable favors, the pragmatic and absolutely fearless thirteen-year-old Smitty stands firmly grounded in a city that is stifling, violent, unpredictable, and full of life. It's not easy to stay balanced. Not with two precocious sisters, a pothead brother, a depressed but steel-willed mother, an infirm grandmother, and an idler dad who's vanished with his appallingly stupid mistress. Now, with dark humor, deadpan resilience, and a quiet sense of the surreal, Smitty recounts a remarkable chain of events that will make this the most transcendent year of her young life.
In
Here They Come, the PEN New England Award-winning Yannick Murphy "flawlessly captures a child's-eye view of a battered society and a battered family" (
Los Angeles Times), "creating a world as magical and harrowing as the struggle to come to grips with maturity" (
Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Reviews