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The Clairvoyants is Karen Brown's most hypnotic novel to date - gothic-inflected psychological suspense that unmasks the secret desires of a young woman with a mystical gift.
On the family homestead by the sea where she grew up, Martha Mary saw ghosts. As a young woman, she hopes to distance herself from those spirits by escaping to an inland college town. There, she is absorbed by a budding romance, relieved by separation from an unstable sister, and disinterested in the flyers seeking information about a young woman who's disappeared - until one Indian summer afternoon when the missing woman appears beneath Martha's apartment window, wearing a down coat, her hair coated with ice.
"Starred Review. Weaves a complex narrative with a lyrical thread of memoires; [An] arresting, unsettling, and beautiful tale. Brown enchants and haunts by making the reader question every voice, every truth." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. A master of intrigue, Brown (The Longings of Wayward Girls, 2013) has crafted a haunting mystery that will relentlessly push readers until the very end." - Booklist
"Brown's novel is a riveting page-turner. She deftly reveals bits of Martha's and Del's past in tandem with more details about the mystery that Martha is trying to unravel, leaving the reader wondering if Martha might be an unreliable narrator. Though the ending isn't entirely satisfying, Brown shows an admirable ability to create suspense." - Publishers Weekly
"While the author's premise - two very different siblings, an absent father, a promiscuous mother, teen years blemished by a murder, and a missing woman - holds promise, Brown has failed to flesh out her characters enough for readers to really care about any of them. The abrupt denouement will leave readers wanting more." - Library Journal
"Karen Brown deftly manages to make the occult ordinary and the strange familiar in this surprising and suspenseful novel." - Lily Tuck, National Book Award-winning author of The News from Paraguay
"Karen Brown draws us effortlessly into the mysterious world of The Clairvoyants, where the line between the dead and the living falls away. An enchanting novel that will keep you turning pages!" - Wendy Walker, bestselling author of All Is Not Forgotten
"Karen Brown's The Clairvoyants is an eerie and affecting dose of Gothic fiction. Martha Mary would've been right at home in a Shirley Jackson novel. Martha sees ghosts, and by the end of the twisting, quietly unnerving story, you will swear you do too." - Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil's Rock
"With an insightful and poetic voice, Karen Brown creates a mystical world filled with suspense, desire and lastly acceptance. Her sophomore novel, The Clairvoyants, simmers from beginning to end and will leave readers wondering if ghosts might be lingering just outside the door." - Lori Roy, Edgar Award-winning author of Bent Road and Until She Comes Home
"The Clairvoyants is a deliciously modern classic ghost story, full of snowstorms and sly sisters and sorrowful, dangerous parties. Karen Brown has created a world in which the dead are as real as the living and the living cannot be trusted. I was haunted by my visit there and, like the ghosts that populate this taut and magnetic novel, I didn't want to leave." - Chloe Benjamin, author of The Anatomy of Dreams
"The Clairvoyants is a beautiful, spookily atmospheric, ridiculously accomplished novel. Karen Brown's writing is so rich with detail, eroticism, and psychological insight that I really would read anything with her name on it - grocery list, instruction manual, casserole recipe, brilliant new novel." - Christine Sneed, author of Paris, He Said
This information about The Clairvoyants was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Karen Brown is the author of a novel, The Longings of Wayward Girls, and two short story collections - Little Sinners and Other Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, the John Gardner Book Award, and was named a Best Book of 2012 by Publishers Weekly, and Pins and Needles: Stories, which was the recipient of AWP's Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Her work has been featured in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, and Good Housekeeping.
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