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Enter a realm where fears are physical and memories come alive in this absorbing psychological suspense thriller.
Once upon a time, back at Darrow-Harker School, Beatrice Hartley and her five best friends were the cool kids, the beautiful ones. Then the shocking death of Jim - their creative genius and Beatrice's boyfriend - changed everything.
One year after graduation, Beatrice is returning to Wincroft - the seaside estate where they spent so many nights sharing secrets, crushes, plans to change the world - hoping she'll get to the bottom of the dark questions gnawing at her about Jim's death.
But as the night plays out in a haze of stilted jokes and unfathomable silence, Beatrice senses she's never going to know what really happened.
Then a mysterious man knocks on the door. Blithely, he announces the impossible: time for them has become stuck, snagged on a splinter that can only be removed if the former friends make the harshest of decisions.
Now Beatrice has one last shot at answers...and at life.
And so begins the Neverworld Wake.
"Thought-provoking and suspenseful, Pessl's YA debut delves into questions of whether even close friends are truly knowable." - Publishers Weekly
"Unpredictable, exciting, and emotionally wrenching, this is a strong purchase for medium and large collections. Grades 9 and up." - School Library Journal
"An eloquent and haunting tale, especially for philosophically-minded readers." - Kirkus
This information about Neverworld Wake 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.
Marisha Pessl, the author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics was born on October 26, 1977 in Clarkston, Michigan. Her mother, Anne, a schoolteacher, was raised in Brazil and Venezuela, and her Austrian father was a mechanical engineer for General Motors. Her parents divorced when she was three and she and her sister, Elke (named after Elke Sommer) were brought up by her mother, visiting her father in Austria once or twice a year. When she was three her family moved to Asheville in Western North Carolina. According to her publisher's bio, as a middle and high school student she had "more extracurricular activities than Imelda Marcos had shoes", including horseback riding, ballet, tap-dancing and jazz lessons, community theater, drawing ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Marisha Pessl's Website
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