Gun Love

It’s been a long time since I’ve been so mesmerized with a novel’s each next sentence. Jennifer Clement is one of our most inventive novelists. There’s no telling what she’ll see. Whatever it is, it’s something right in front of us, but—here is the magic trick—something we have never before seen. Gun Love is an amazement: fierce, inventive, tender

Rick Bass, author of For A Little While

Clement is a brilliant stylist... her metaphors and similes are superb; and together they create a haunting atmosphere ... Always evocative, it is an unforgettable knockout not to be missed

Starred review, Booklist

Pearl’s story takes place in a world both strange and familiar, in the fairy tale of her mother’s imagination and in an America pockmarked by gun violence and poverty ... Clement’s quiet tragedy is moving, unsettling, and filled with characters who will haunt you long after the story ends

Kirkus Review

Clement’s affecting and memorable novel is also an incisive social commentary that will give readers much to ponder

Publishers Weekly

Clement turns her hypnotic pen to the story of America’s love affair with guns

Huffington Post

Taut, spare, musical, metaphor-laden, haunting, and every so often it hits you so hard in the gut that you gasp

Jonathan Miles, BookPage

Jennifer Clement's new novel is appallingly timely ... Ms Clement creates a weird poetry of murderous force. Chekhov’s narrative principle—that a gun hung on the wall in the first act must eventually go off—has become a metaphorical rule of storytelling. To reflect American reality, Ms Clement puts a gun on every wall in every room

The Economist

Haunting ... poetic ... Full of sorrow and aching sweetness, "Gun Love" provides a glimpse of people who dwell every day knee deep in the toxic waste of our gun culture. They may be America’s forgotten children, but after reading this novel, you are not likely to forget them

Ron Charles, Washington Post

Though this world is harrowing, it's also fortified with ample wit and tenderness. The sweet sorrow of doomed maternal love is at the novel's thrumming center, as is the author's cockeyed affection for the region. "In our part of Florida everything was puzzled," Pearl tells us. Gun Love potently illuminates this puzzled land, and the complicated fates of those who dwell in the pockets visitors won't find on a map

Laura Van Den Berg, Oprah.com

Clement's book is charged with gut-punch sentences and indelible images, but [the] second act is particularly searing ... Propelled to its inevitable denouement less by plot than by the intensity of its author's prose and singular vision, this is an uncompromising snapshot of America's ills

Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

Clement's spare, often oblique style makes this book feel like a great lost murder ballad by the likes of Johnny Cash or Nick Cave ... excellent at describing the intensity of the love between a mother and child within a claustrophobic environment, and the disruption that a hostile male presence causes to this bond ... One of those rare books that the reader might wish to be a few dozen pages longer, to spend more time in this fully realised world

Alexander Larman, The Observer

The writing is crisp and the images are sharp

Terese Svoboda, New York Times

Offer[s] a glimpse of what a poetics of gun violence might look like… In this book, the machinery of violence purchases a sense of belonging—of thrilling, life-or-death simplicity

Katy Waldman, The New Yorker.com

Through a memorable coming-of-age story set in America’s margins, Clement makes all of these things true at once: A gun is a valentine, a secret-bearer, a penitent, a world destroyer, an exposed belly, an insurance policy, a sudden act of God

Salon

A master of figurative language

Lucy Feldman, Time, **Books of the Year**

A neon fairytale... written in the punchy, exaggerated style of a graphic novel, it’s surprisingly enjoyable

Lois Beckett, Guardian

The inventiveness and charm of Clement’s narrative voice are such that Gun Love never stops being a pleasure to read. Every paragraph is nutty and passionate and glamorous

Sandra Newman, Guardian