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by Sarah Cornwell
In What I Had Before I Had You by Sarah Cornwell, a woman must face the truth about her past in this luminous, evocative literary novel of parents and children, guilt and forgiveness, memory and magical thinking, set in the faded, gritty world of the New Jersey Shore.
Olivia was only fifteen the summer she left her hometown of Ocean Vista. Two decades later, on a visit with her children, her nine-year-old son Daniel, recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, disappears. Olivia's search for him sparks tender and painful memories of her past - of her fiercely loving and secretive mother, Myla, an erratic and beautiful psychic, and the discovery of heartbreaking secrets that shattered her world.
"Starred Review. Captivating... Depth of insight, dreamy prose, and an engrossing storyline mark this wonderful debut." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Cornwell's first novel is an authentic and artful coming-of-age story that is uniquely multigenerational...With great attention to detail and a smooth flow between past and present, this emotionally charged narrative is as memorable as it is compelling." - Booklist
"Gorgeously crafted, Cornwell's tale shimmers and shimmies with nimble dialogue and poignantly flawed characters...Grafting magical thinking onto gimlet-eyed acceptance, Cornwell's debut novel enchants." - Kirkus
"An incandescent debut by turns thrilling and meditative; part coming of age novel, part exploration of the fragility and complexity of love and family. Sarah Cornwell is a writer to be celebrated and watched." - Philipp Meyer, author of The Son
"This is a beautifully written book, bold and wounding. Read it and you will never look at the Jersey Shore in quite the same way again." (James Magnuson, author of Famous Writers I Have Known
"Only a few writers can genuinely capture that stormy period between childhood and adulthood and Sarah Cornwell is one of them." - Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy
"Cornwell's debut novel is equal parts page-turner and dreamy meditation on the nature of mental illness...An important exploration of the deepest philosophical inquiries into the nature of existence, family, and love." - Antonya Nelson, author of Bound
"Sarah Cornwell has a brilliant eye for the telling detail, and a wonderfully original way of embodying family history." - Andrea Barrett, author of Archangel and The Voyage of the Narwhal
This information about What I Had Before I Had You 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.
Sarah Cornwell grew up in Narberth, Pennsylvania. Her fiction has appeared in publications including The 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Missouri Review, Mid-American Review, Gulf Coast, and Hunger Mountain, and her screenwriting has been honored with a Humanitas Prize. A former James Michener Fellow at UT-Austin, Sarah has worked as an investigator of police misconduct, a writer in the schools, an MCAT tutor, a psychological research interviewer, a toy seller, and a screenwriter. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
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