A woman considers pregnancy, motherhood, and the nature of female relationships in this profound and provocative novel.
Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond and complications with Anna's own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose stories of the children they have had, or longed for, or lost, crowd in.
The Long Answer is a stunning novel of secrets kept, and secrets shared. Deeply empathetic and hugely absorbing, it unravels the intimate dynamics of female friendship, sisterhood, motherhood and grief, and the ways that women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond and complications with Anna's own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose stories of the children they have had, or longed for, or lost, crowd in.
The Long Answer is a stunning novel of secrets kept, and secrets shared. Deeply empathetic and hugely absorbing, it unravels the intimate dynamics of female friendship, sisterhood, motherhood and grief, and the ways that women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"In concentric circles of stories told and stories secreted away, The Long Answer is about women making life and losing life and about fertility itself - the promise and the more complicated truth. This beautiful novel tugs at friendship, marriage, family and women in moments of heartbreaking and miraculous transformation." - Ramona Ausubel
"A brilliantly constructed novel about women, and about the power of love in the heart of one woman through whom these female souls are elucidated, their passions, their terrible losses, and their bravery. These characters breathe on the page, and their stories are moving and involving. Anna Hogeland is a wonderfully talented writer." - Richard Bausch
"A brilliant debut, both coolly empathetic and searingly personal, a powerful bridge between fiction's two current modes. Anna Hogeland writes beautifully, with unwavering passion and insight, about the complexities of motherhood and female relationships." - Jess Walter
"A brilliantly constructed novel about women, and about the power of love in the heart of one woman through whom these female souls are elucidated, their passions, their terrible losses, and their bravery. These characters breathe on the page, and their stories are moving and involving. Anna Hogeland is a wonderfully talented writer." - Richard Bausch
"A brilliant debut, both coolly empathetic and searingly personal, a powerful bridge between fiction's two current modes. Anna Hogeland writes beautifully, with unwavering passion and insight, about the complexities of motherhood and female relationships." - Jess Walter
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