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From the author of the acclaimed novel Temporary, an intimate exploration of time, a fable about love, an epic daydream for a broken-hearted world.
Annie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn't there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller's dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world.
Terrace Story follows the characters who suffer these repercussions and reverberations: the little family of three, their future now deeply uncertain, and those who orbit their fragile universe. The distance and love between these characters expands limitlessly, across generations. How far can the mind travel when it's looking for something that is gone? Where do we put our loneliness, longing, and desire? What do we do with the emotions that seem to stretch beyond the body, beyond the boundaries of life and death?
Based on the National Magazine Award–winning story, Hilary Leichter's profound second novel asks how we nurture love when death looms over every moment. From one of our most innovative and daring writers, Terrace Story is an astounding meditation on loss, a reverie about extinction, and a map for where to go next.
"The delightful sophomore effort from Leichter expands on her National Magazine Award–winning story about a magic closet by adding multiple timelines that stretch into the future...there are plenty of wry observations on time and memory...Leichter soars with this cogent yet dreamlike tale." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Leichter is juggling plenty of symbolism along with her zingy surrealism-lite and it can be a lot to untangle, but at the book's heart are the relatable grief and terror that go along with love—of our planet, of another—and the threat of losing it...Leichter bends minds—and physics—to give a light touch to deep grief." —Kirkus Reviews
"Terrace Story is fun and profound, fickle and erudite. It is an irresistibly cool book." —Booklist
"A sprawling, gutting romance...Terrace Story's metaphysical turns are undergirded by intense, emotional precision...We may well outgrow one another the way we outgrow our house, our home, and even our planet. That's a difficult truth to swallow. Perhaps we can only see it clearly piece by piece, story by story, over a lifetime. That is the pleasure and heartbreak of reading Leichter's work: the knowledge that sometimes stories have no beginning or end." —BOMB Magazine
"Terrace Story is brilliantly inventive, enchanting, disturbing, beautiful, and unlike anything I've ever read. I loved what it does with time—gone and not gone, lost and found where we never put it. Really extraordinary." —Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement
"Hilary Leichter, one of our most original novelists, amazes us again with a beautifully unclassifiable novel. Step out onto the terrace, where space and time, cause and effect, and fiction and reality have been redefined and gorgeously subverted. Terrace Story isn't a novel you merely read; it's a book you inhabit." —Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Trust
"Prepare to be astonished. Like the magical terrace of its title, Hilary Leichter's spectacular second novel contains the whole world. Told with boundless imagination, wisdom, and effortlessly gorgeous prose, Terrace Story will transform your understanding of time, space, memory, love, longing, and family and make you see your life anew. This book is a wonder." —Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers
This information about Terrace Story 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.
Hilary Leichter is the author of the novels Temporary and Terrace Story. She has been a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Prize, and her work in Harper's Magazine won the 2021 National Magazine Award in Fiction. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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