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Spare and haunting, The Shades is a gripping mystery and a story of a family in crisis.
A year has passed since Catherine and Michael Hall lost their teenage daughter in a car accident, leaving them and their sixteen-year-old son, Rowan, reeling in the aftermath of the tragedy. After Rowan escapes to boarding school, Catherine withdraws from her life as a successful London gallerist to Hamdean, an apartment in a Georgian country manor, where she and Michael had hoped to spend their retirement. When a beguiling young woman, Keira, appears at the house claiming to have once lived there, Catherine is reanimated by the promise of a meaningful connection. However, their relationship soon shifts to one of forbidding uncertainty as the mysteries of the past collide with the truth of the present.
Emotionally complex and psychologically tense, The Shades raises questions about the inescapability of human nature and speaks to our deepest anxieties: the safety of those we love and the sanctuary of home.
"Starred Review. A thoroughly modern novel with a Gothic feel; a fully realized vision." - Kirkus
"The prose sparkles as she unpacks emotional wounds, but the threads of story remain too hazy and incomplete to be fully satisfying. This compact family drama captures the thinly masked desperation of grief with an eerie undercurrent." - Pubishers Weekly
"The Shades is an elegy that reads like a fever dream of loss, a jewel box that enthralls." - Bruce Wagner, author of Dead Stars
"The Shades compels with searing intensity. This extraordinary myth-like novel, about a family's loss and unraveling, will live on in your imagination for a long time. Evgenia Citkowitz is a remarkable writer." - Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl
"Evgenia Citkowitz's The Shades is not a first novel; it is a tour-de-force, a powerful, wicked, compassionate, and beautifully written account of the dangers we keep in our head and heart, including love. Citkowitz, a master of mood, alters our vision of what fiction is, or should be, by altering our perception of its possibilities in page after glorious page in this startling and startlingly original book." - Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and author of White Girls
"The Shades is an elegant meditation on marriage, grief, and loss. In cool and beguiling prose, with a style all her own, Evgenia Citkowitz's taut and powerful novel is part mystery, part psychological portrait, and every bit engaging." - Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette
"Evgenia Citkowitz has written a haunting novel about love and loss that moves fascinatingly back and forth across the borderlines of reality and myth. Her bold use of the cultured English upper middle class as the setting for a savage reimagining of Orpheus and Eurydice marks her out as a gifted, original writer." - James Lasdun, author of The Fall Guy
"I have never read a novel in which the events are recounted with such subtle interweaving back and forth through time, building up a deeply woven texture of thought and emotion. A brilliant piece of story-telling." - Tim Pears, author of In the Place of Fallen Leaves
This information about The Shades 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.
Evgenia Citkowitz was born in New York and educated in London and the United States. Her debut novella and short story collection, Ether, was a New York Times Editors' Choice. She lives in Los Angeles.
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