The Truth About Celia
  • Published: 15 August 2004
  • ISBN: 9780375727702
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $32.99

The Truth About Celia

Formats & editions
EBook
18 Dec 2007
Paperback
15 Aug 2004
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While playing alone in her backyard one afternoon, seven-year-old Celia suddenly disappears while her father Christopher is inside giving a tour of their historic house and her mother Janet is at an orchestra rehearsal.

Utterly shattered, Christopher, a writer of fantasy and science fiction, withdraws from everyone around him, especially his wife, losing himself in his writing by conjuring up worlds where Celia still exists—as a child, as a teenager, as a young single mother—and revealing in his stories not only his own point of view but also those of Janet, the policeman in charge of the case, and the townspeople affected by the tragedy, ultimately culminating in a portrait of a small town changed forever. The Truth About Celia is a profound meditation on grief and loss and how we carry on in its aftermath.
  • Published: 15 August 2004
  • ISBN: 9780375727702
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Kevin Brockmeier

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia; the children's novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. In addition to The New Yorker, he has published in The New York Times, The Georgia Review, McSweeney's, Zoetrope, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and the O. Henry: Prize Stories anthology. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. He's the 2009 guest editor for the anthology series Best American Fantasy 3 and was named one of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. Brockmeier lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.

Also by Kevin Brockmeier

The Illumination
Things That Fall From The Sky
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Praise for The Truth About Celia

"Both devastating and dazzling; in its painful fusion of pathos, fantasy and--ultimately--realism, Brockmeier's heartbreaking book is reminiscent of The Lovely Bones." --Time Out

"Brockmeier's prose hauntingly ventures beyond the mundane and into places that only a grieving mind can go. With beautiful attention to detail . . . and clear respect for language, Brockmeier has penned an extraordinary first novel." --BookPage

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