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Book Summary and Reviews of All That's Left to Tell by Daniel Lowe

All That's Left to Tell by Daniel Lowe

All That's Left to Tell

by Daniel Lowe

  • Critics' Consensus (2):
  • Published:
  • Feb 2017, 304 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

"An utterly engrossing novel about the universal need to tell stories in order to survive, to remember, and to be remembered." - Laila Lalami, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Moor's Account

What if you had the chance to re-imagine your past?

Every night, Marc Laurent, an American taken hostage in Pakistan, is bound and blindfolded. And every night, a woman he knows only as Josephine visits his cell. At first, her questions are mercenary: is there anyone back home who will pay the ransom? But when Marc can offer no name, she asks him a question about his daughter that is even more terrifying than his captivity. And so begins a strange yet increasingly comforting ritual, in which Josephine and Marc tell each other stories. As these stories build upon one another, a father and daughter start to find their way toward understanding each other again.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Luscious ... Compelling ... With its shifting points of view and emotional authenticity, Lowe's masterfully crafted first novel will be a surefire hit with book discussion groups." - Booklist

"Not since Kevin Brockmeier's The Truth About Celia has a novel made a more dramatic case for the importance of stories as a way to deal with life's tragic events…The characters here remain real and memorable, a credit to Lowe's storytelling skill." - Publishers Weekly

"Captivating…Lowe's prose is evocative, the plot gripping, and the attachment that reaches across the alienation between these characters reaches out to the reader as well. A story about storytelling, stirring and effective." - Kirkus

"Daniel Lowe's debut novel opens with a fierce, immediate narrative grip that continues to tighten until the book reaches a climax that resonates long after one has closed the cover of this haunted and haunting book." - Stuart Dybek, author of Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots

"Through carefully crafted story telling and an expert's ear for dialogue, Daniel Lowe delivers an outstanding debut. The plot of All That's Left to Tell is satisfyingly ripped from recent headlines and takes the reader on a dizzying, dream-state of a ride as Lowe unspools the storyline to stunning effect." - Christopher Scotton, author of The Secret Wisdom of the Earth

"Alternately gripping and dreamy, Daniel Lowe's debut imagines what the stories we tell reveal about ourselves, and how they may save us." - Stewart O'Nan, author of West of Sunset

This information about All That's Left to Tell 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.

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Author Information

Daniel Lowe

Daniel Lowe lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he has taught writing at the Community College of Allegheny County for twenty-five years. For more than that, he has been writing in relative obscurity, though his poetry and fiction have appeared in literary magazines, including West Branch, The Bridge, The Paterson Literary Review, Ellipsis, Blue Stem, Midway Journal, and The Madison Review. He enjoys hours spent with his children, days spent with his wife, extended afternoons, and watching birds at feeders outside the window while he idly sits at his computer waiting for another sentence to take shape. He runs slowly in the park.

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