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A quietly startling, beautiful book, The Gunners engages us with vividly unforgettable characters, and advances Rebecca Kauffman's place as one of the most important young writers of her generation.
Following her wonderfully received first novel, Another Place You've Never Been, called "mesmerizing," "powerful," and "gorgeous," by critics all over the country, Rebecca Kauffman returns with Mikey Callahan, a thirty-year-old who is suffering from the clouded vision of macular degeneration. He struggles to establish human connections----even his emotional life is a blur.
As the novel begins, he is reconnecting with "The Gunners," his group of childhood friends, after one of their members has committed suicide. Sally had distanced herself from all of them before ending her life, and she died harboring secrets about the group and its individuals. Mikey especially needs to confront dark secrets about his own past and his father. How much of this darkness accounts for the emotional stupor Mikey is suffering from as he reaches his maturity? And can The Gunners, prompted by Sally's death, find their way to a new day? The core of this adventure, made by Mikey, Alice, Lynn, Jimmy, and Sam, becomes a search for the core of truth, friendship, and forgiveness.
"Starred Review. Perceptive, funny, and endearing ... Reminiscent of The Big Chill and St. Elmo's Fire, this remarkable novel is just as satisfying and provides readers with an entire cast of characters who will feel like old friends upon finishing." - Publishers Weekly
"A little bit like The Big Chill, Kauffman's (Another Place You've Never Been, 2016) quiet and deep second novel reconciles the responsibilities we carry and the secrets we keep with the outsize pleasure of being known and loved by a chosen family." - Booklist
"Neither dark nor despairing, this work admirably expresses the satisfying comfort derived from the survival of such long-term friendships even as it evokes sadness about the losses and challenges that come with transitioning to adulthood." - Library Journal
"I recommend you read every single thing Rebecca Kauffman writes - start with this beautiful novel, and start now." - Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
"Funny, raw, and deeply elegant, The Gunners is ultimately a meditation on friendship, that least examined, most mysterious form of love, perhaps more sacred for its incompleteness, for the ways we can never fool ourselves completely into believing we truly know one another." - Rufi Thorpe, author of Dear Fang, with Love and The Girls from Corona del Mar
"The Gunners explores what it means to have people crawl into your heart and settle in for a lifetime. In this lovely, truthful novel of six people who have been friends since childhood, Rebecca Kauffman strips enduring love of all its usual romantic costumery, and shows us how it actually works." - Martha Woodroof, author of Small Blessings
"Rebecca Kauffman's brilliantly rendered story of six childhood friends tells the hard truth about human love - what it seems to be from far away, and what it really is up close - boldly, with compassion and warmth and humor." - Kayla Rae Whitaker, author of The Animators
This information about The Gunners 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.
Rebecca Kauffman received her MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the author of The Gunners and Another Place You've Never Been, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Originally from rural northeastern Ohio, she now lives in Virginia.
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