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  • Published: 30 June 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241972878
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Imagine Me Gone




A rich and achingly poignant portrait of a family bound together and torn apart by grief and guilt

Michael is a bright kid: funny, likable, obsessed with books and music. His sister Celia is the sensible one, pragmatic, always tougher than the boys. And then there's Alec, the most ambitious but also the most sensitive, growing up in the shadow of his older siblings. The children are still living at home when their father walks into the woods alone one day and takes his own life. Years later, one of them will follow him.

Weaving together the voices of five family members, Adam Haslett imagines how a single tragedy can define many lives.

  • Published: 30 June 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241972878
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

About the author

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and winner of a Michener Fellowship. He is the author of the highly acclaimed short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here?, published by Cape in 2002.

Also by Adam Haslett

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Praise for Imagine Me Gone

Imagine Me Gone is literature of the highest order. It manages to be both dreadfully sad and hilariously funny all at once. It is luminous with love

Peter Carey

Brilliantly captures the excruciating burden of love

Esquire

Exceptional, haunting, intimate and panoramic...There is an exhilaration in reading something so perceptive and well executed...This is certainly a sad story, but also a warm and moving one, which bears witness to the intertwining of grief and love

Sunday Times

Haslett has a great gift for capturing the strikingly different inner worlds of his characters and rendering them in beautiful prose

Guardian

It's not just one of the best novels of the year; it might be one of the best novels ever about living, and dying, with mental illness

NPR Best Books of the Year 2016

Publisher's description. How much can any of us do to save those we love from themselves? What does the dark legacy of guilt do to a person, to a relationship, to a family? Achingly poignant and sharply witty, this portrait of a single tragedy rippling across many lives has all the makings of an American classic.

Penguin

Raw, tender and hilarious...a family saga reminiscent at times of Anne Enright's The Green Road...The Pulitzer-Prize-shortlisted Haslett lets rip to dazzling effect...A showstopper

Daily Mail

There are some books, and this is one, that grab you in the first paragraphs and don't let go. A beautiful novel that re-evaluates how we cope with tragedy

ELLE

With skill and subtlety, Imagine Me Gone sweeps the reader into its characters' worlds and makes us reflect on our own lives. It might be the best American novel about a middle-class family since Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections

Independent