Price: $16.95
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An emotionally powerful book; it is organic, surprising, and edgy in a way that will appeal to male readers as well as female readers. It has the potential to be groundbreaking in its raw, honest portrayal of a just-barely-functioning family. Billy Lombardo is interested in the beauty of words. He is also a great observer of the world around him, and he is exquisite and precise in getting that world onto the page.
“Billy Lombardo's exquisite first novel shows us a fractured family the only way it can accurately be shown—through a fractured lens. The sorrow and honesty of this wise book is almost unbearable, but it's literature's best kind of unbearable, built upon a foundation of generosity, heart, and masterful craft.”
—Patrick Somerville, author of The Cradle and Trouble
“How to Hold a Woman is a wonderful novel. Billy Lombardo writes with a fierce honesty; gracefully guiding the reader through the tenacious connections that bind us to the people we love. A luminous and heartbreaking book.”
—David Haynes, author of The Full Matilda
“Billy Lombardo’s How to Hold a Woman is a one of the wisest books about loss and the numbness of grief I've ever read. A family faces the unbearable, and as readers we’re taken to the edge of the abyss, surveying the emotional fallout. A smart and moving account of how people cope with every parent’s nightmare, Lombardo’s achievement is in arranging his narrative around the new unspeakable hole in the center of their lives, and deftly takes us through the heart-wrenching, heart-healing aftermath as the family stumbles past their bewilderment and grief to what lies beyond.”
—CJ Hribal, author of The Company Car and The Clouds in Memphis
“Billy Lombardo's How to Hold a Woman is these things: exquisitely written, real, painful, and true. His talent for depicting the nuances of marriage and family is extraordinary; reading this, one feels as though Alan, Audrey and the boys are your close friends, about whom you somehow know a little more than you should. His ear for dialogue is spot-on, and his understanding of the human heart is profound. This is simply a lovely, heartbreaking book.”
—Elizabeth Crane, author of You Must Be This Happy to Enter and When the Messenger Is Hot
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Billy Lombardo is the author of The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories, a Chicago Tribune “Best Fiction of 2005” selection. His novel Man With Two Arms is due from The Overlook Press in 2010. |
