- Published: 16 July 2019
- ISBN: 9781760144708
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 272
The Need
- Published: 16 July 2019
- ISBN: 9781760144708
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 272
The Need, the eerily gorgeous new novel by Helen Phillips, fills the void, offering up the perfect, insightful look into the way motherhood warps the world around you… Phillips brilliantly captures the dissonant dualities of being a mother: the ways strength is matched with fragility, tenderness with ferocity, nurturing with palpable, almost riotous need.
Nylon
A novel Shirley Jackson might write if she’d dropped acid with Rivka Galchen.
Hillary Kelly, Vulture
A dark fable about delirium and doubling that takes the terrifying vulnerability of motherhood and transforms it into something dangerously sinuous and entirely uncanny.
James Bradley
This book held me hostage, invaded my dreams and my waking thoughts, and readjusted my brain; Phillips is, as always, doing something at once wildly her own and utterly primal. Maybe it doesn't surprise me that the strangest book I've read about motherhood is also the best, but it does thrill me.
Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers
Suspenseful and mysterious, insightful and tender, Phillips' new thriller cements her standing as a deservedly celebrated author with a singular sense of story and style… [A] superbly engaging read—quirky, perceptive, and gently provocative.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The Need is a profound meditation on the nature of reality, a fearless examination of parenthood, and also somehow a thriller. This is an extraordinary and dazzlingly original work from one of our most gifted and interesting writers.
Emily St John Mandel
Helen Phillips is one of the most exciting young writers working today, and I envy those who get to discover her work here for the first time.
Jenny Offill
I love Helen Phillips's wild, brilliant, eccentric brain. Her vision flashes down like a lightning bolt into everyday terrors.
Lauren Groff
Helen Phillips sings like a Siren on the page (if a Siren also had a killer sense of humor).
Karen Russell
Helen Phillips is a funny, subversive, enigmatic, melancholy wonder.
Kevin Brockmeier
The Need is a spellbinding novel, both unsettling and irresistible. The best fiction finds the uncanny within the familiar; it makes us feel the fantastical undercurrent of our embodied lives. With exquisite economy and evocative prose, Phillips manifests the surreal, terrifying, and visceral experience of motherhood.
Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others
Helen Phillips has created an existential page-turner that captures, with perfect sharpness, the fierce delirium of motherhood, the longing to understand the workings of our universe, and the wondrous and terrifying mystery that is time. The Need is a brain-bending heartbreaker of a novel, and definitive proof that Helen Phillips is one of the most spellbindingly original writers working today.
Laura Van Den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
This is a book about the biggest things you can imagine--the dreadful potentiality of life, the fierceness of love, and the terrifying and exhilarating mystery of motherhood. Helen Phillips writes at the nexus of science fiction and psychological realism, conjuring a narrative so mind-bending and immersive that it'll change what you see as real. She is an author at the height of her power, and we are so lucky to be living in her moment.
Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine
From the opening sentence, The Need sucked me in (I read it in one sitting) and then spat me out at the end, feeling dazed and slightly off-kilter in the best and most pleasurable way. Phillips evokes with astoundingly masterful prose the lengths to which a mother will go for her children. At once a fast-paced thriller and psychologically astute literary novel, the intensity of the plot is leavened with moments of startling tenderness. Bravo.
Kate Christensen, author of The Last Cruise and The Great Man
The atmosphere is as close and taut as a thriller, but this is, in fact, both a highly original examination of grief and an extraordinarily vivid evocation of motherhood — the moments of terror and hilarity, the visceral burden of it, and the fleeting, but almost transcendent, joy.
Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail
A chilling novel from a blazing talent... in addition to being a cerebral meditation on motherhood at its most elemental – fierce, beatific, sanity-thieving – it’s an adroitly executed thriller with a quasi-sci-fi twist. Mercilessly tense throughout, its opening chapter is a belter... A bracingly singular achievement, it’s surreal, blackly comic and ultimately generous.
Hephzibah Anderson, Observer
Helen Phillips’s novel begins to reveal itself, veering away from what looks initially like conventional suspense into something more speculative and philosophical with nods to both sci-fi and horror... the what-ifs animate this novel, the narrative splitting and looping back on itself as it tries out parallel possibilities, various fantasies and nightmares... Like parenthood itself, The Need is frightening and maddening and full of dark comedy... Phillips, as careful with language as she is bold with structure, captures many small sharp truths.
The New York Times
Phillips writes exceptionally well of the insatiable demands two young children can make on a mother... yet this is also a horror story about the vulnerability of motherhood that doubles up as a love letter to the miracle existence of children. At the same time, Phillips consistently plays tricks with the reader's perspective... and with the possibility of parallel realities, rooted in a mother's worst possible fears, playing out at the level of science fiction... One of the most heart-stopping motherhood novels you'll read all year.
Metro
So smart and brave about motherhood... Molly's struggle to remain her full self while giving so much away is electrifying... Mothers will recognize so much in this fresh novel - but they aren't the only ones who should read it. Phillips has found a way to make these experiences universal.
Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post
The Need opens with the taut terror of a suspense novel, but its destination is not the twist reveal or the explosive showdown — it’s an exquisitely tender meditation on motherhood’s joys and comorbid torments.
Huffington Post
I'll also be calling in sick for The Need, by Helen Phillips, whose unexpected fiction reminds us that the membrane between reality and madness is porous indeed.
Sarah Lyall, The New York Times
Phillips is a writer who is unafraid to confront the sublime; to demystify its capacity to inspire terror and ecstasy, both.
Nylon
What presents at first as a straightforward thriller is quickly revealed — in a series of short, sharp chapters — to be a sort of narrative nesting doll, a story infused with both essential home truths and a wild, almost unhinged sense of unreality.
Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
With her subtle use of magical realism, author Helen Phillips has created a story that is as much a commentary on motherhood as it is an exploration of existentialism. The Need manages to be thrilling and curious as much as it is heartbreaking—a mind altering exploration of 'what if?'
Jennifer Johnson, Emissourian
Part speculative fiction and part horror... Helen Phillips uses the notion of portals to alternative worlds in order to explore the strain that motherhood puts on personality, a clean split between the fierce biological imperative to nurture and protect, and the profound need for solitude, independence, and rest.
Kerryn Goldsworthy, Sydney Morning Herald