Five Tuesdays in Winter - by Lily King (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Five Tuesdays in Winter moved me, inspired me, thrilled me. It filled up every chamber of my heart. I loved this book." --Ann Patchett

By the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria comes a masterful new collection of short stories

Lily King, one of the most "brilliant" (New York Times Book Review), "wildly talented" (Chicago Tribune), and treasured authors of contemporary fiction, returns after her recent bestselling novels with Five Tuesdays in Winter, her first book of short fiction.

Told in the intimate voices of complex, endearing characters, Five Tuesdays in Winter intriguingly subverts expectations as it explores desire, loss, jolting violence, and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A reclusive bookseller begins to feel the discomfort of love again. Two college roommates have a devastating middle-aged reunion. A proud old man rages powerlessly in his granddaughter's hospital room. A writer receives a visit from all the men who have tried to suppress her voice.

Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, this wide-ranging collection of ten selected stories by one of our most accomplished chroniclers of the human heart is an exciting addition to Lily King's oeuvre of acclaimed fiction.

Review Quotes

Praise for Five Tuesdays in Winter:

Finalist for The Story Prize
An Amazon Top Ten for November
A November Indie Next Pick
One of Entertainment Weekly's "Must Read Books of November"
One of Good Morning America's "15 Books to Curl Up With This November"
A Most Anticipated Book of Fall by Vogue, TIME, Esquire, People, Washington Post, and LitHub
A Best Book the Year at NPR and Kirkus

"In our time of anxiety and isolation, King writes stories to curl up in, by which I mean they afford us something rarely celebrated in literature: comfort."--New York Times Book Review

"Fierce, funny, tender stories that demonstrate both range and emotional heft.... all of them are stunners." --Boston Globe

"King returns to the page with a collection of short stories that continue to prove her prowess in all things love and human connection."--Entertainment Weekly

"Lily King isn't afraid of big emotional subjects: desire and grief, longing and love, growth and self-acceptance. But she eschews high drama for the immersive quiet of the everyday... Here we inhabit the worlds of authors and mothers, children and friends; we experience their lives in clear, graceful prose that swells with generous possibility. This is a book for writers and lovers, a book about storytelling itself, a book for all of us."--Washington Post

"Like her acclaimed books Writers & Lovers and Euphoria, King's latest finds characters longing for love and wrestling with change."--Time

"The award-winning author of Euphoria and four other novels, speaks volumes in short form. Her new collection, Five Tuesdays in Winter, is as compelling and accomplished as anything you're likely to read in the genre . . . Story for story, this collection is simply a knockout."--Portland Press Herald

"These are stories of outsiders finding their people, of new perspectives, and they place King--already one of our most poignant and moving contemporary novelists--among Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, and Mary Gaitskill as one of our great short-story writers as well." --Vogue, "Best Books to Read This Fall"

"A masterful, enchanting collection of stories illuminating the spectrum of human love--the platonic, the unrequited, the forbidden and the unconditional." --People

"Wonderfully absorbing...All 10 of these tales build gratifyingly to moments of epiphany that never feel unearned... Long form or short, this is a writer who has mastered the art of conveying depths of human feeling in one beautiful sentence after another." --NPR

"The acclaimed author of Writers & Lovers returns with ten shimmering stories, each one a gemlike exploration of love, loss, and grief... Each masterful story reminds us that King is one of our finest cartographers of the human heart." --Esquire

"Lily King writes about love better than anybody." -- Jenna Bush Hager, Best Books to Read in November

"Breathlessly beautiful." --Zibby Owens, Good Morning America

"King's collection continually breaks through stereotypes, defying expectation and not allowing the reader to pinpoint anything typical about her short stories...King honors how human life is never what we think it is, always changing and morphing. By allowing characters their full range of pain, vulnerability, and happiness, Five Tuesdays in Winter drops readers into imperfect lives, evoking awe and anger and admiration and futility, reminding us how it feels to be human." --Ploughshares

"[I]t is the exquisite attention with which King articulates all that roils inside us that secures her place in the contemporary canon." -- Financial Times

"Intimate and revealing, this is an unflinchingly honest and insightful collection." -- Observer

"Raw yet hopeful." --Irish Times

"The endearing, vulnerable characters in bestselling novelist Lily King's ten clever, charming short stories are facing up to life's dramas and demands -- broken hearts, shattered illusions, troubled parents or children -- with a grace that belies the damaging emotional fallout." -- Daily Mail (UK)

"King's observations are both sharp and generous. Five Tuesdays in Winter is a collection worth dipping into again and again."--Bookpage

"These stories crackle and shine, and King is a master of the thumbnail portrait: she can create a fully realized life in a single paragraph and then alter it in breathtaking ways. This is a must for fans of the short story." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"[A] dazzling new collection . . . Though the protagonists range from a young girl to a middle-aged gay man to a gruff nonagenarian grandfather, the stories share certain characteristics; King is a master at conveying through subtle description the small, painful, bumbling moments of life and the awkwardness of human interactions . . . A series of beautifully written character studies brimming with insight into the human condition." --Library Journal, starred review

"King can make you fall in love with a character fast, especially the smart, vulnerable, often painfully self-conscious adolescent protagonists featured in several of the 10 stories collected here...Full of insights and pleasures." --Kirkus, starred review

Praise for Writers & Lovers:

A New York Times Notable Book
One of Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2020
One of NPR's "Fresh Air" with Maureen Corrigan's Top 10 Books of 2020
A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2020 Selected for Amazon's Best Literature and Fiction of 2020
A New York Times Best Seller
A New York Times Book Review Group Text Selection
A #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today
Belletrist Book Club April Selection by Emma Roberts
An Indie Next Pick
Featured in Best of 2020 lists by Washington Post, Kirkus, Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, Guardian, Marie Claire, Vulture, Lithub, People, and Amazon Book Review.

"A comic and compassionate novel . . . It shares with [Euphoria] a fascination with the difficulty of defining the worth of one's life when the familiar markers of adult achievement are slow to materialize. With wit and what reads like deep insider wisdom, Ms. King captures the chronic low-level panic of taking a leap into the artsy unknown and finding yourself adrift, without land or rescue in sight." --Maureen Corrigan, Wall Street Journal

"I loved this book not just from the first chapter or the first page but from the first paragraph. . .The voice is just so honest and riveting and insightful about creativity and life." --Curtis Sittenfeld, London Evening Standard

"Delightful . . . An unmistakable broadside against fiction's love affair with macho strivers, even-- or especially-- when layers of lyricism and tenderness coat their machismo. The emotional force of Writers & Lovers is considerable." --New York Times Book Review

"Romance isn't the point for Casey. Love is the gravy; words are the filet. Finding a way to build a life around work she loves, finding a way to support herself as a writer-- this is the line connecting all three corners of the love triangle at the heart of this novel." --New York Times Book Review, Group Text Book Club

"Writers & Lovers made me happy. Even as the narrator grieves the loss of her mother and struggles to make art and keep a roof over her head, the novel is suffused with hopefulness and kindness. Lily King writes with a great generosity of spirit." --Ann Patchett

"Writers & Lovers is exactly the book we need now. Witty and heartfelt. . . I could not stop reading." --Judy Blume

"This smooth, deliberate chronicle of creation keeps the men in their place and Casey firmly rooted at the center of her own story. Instead of casting her as a woman torn between archetypes of male creativity, Writers & Lovers portrays her as a woman in thrall to her own generative processes, a devotee to the art of (her own) attention." --Los Angeles Times

"Among the elements that make Writers & Lovers so winning are the perfectly calibrated little details, convincing conversations, and droll wit. . . Writers & Lovers is a book about passion, desire, grief, determination, and finding one's way. It's also about craving love, family, and success. . . generously infused with heart and soul and wit and wisdom." --NPR

"Writers & Lovers is a funny novel about grief, and, worse, it's dangerously romantic, bold enough and fearless enough to imagine the possibility of unbounded happiness." --Washington Post

"King captures the agita of an early-life crisis and the eccentricities of a writer's life, spiking the narrative with wit, sumptuous imagery and hilarious skewerings of literary elitism." --People

"King has created a woman on the cusp of personal fulfillment and strong enough to stand on her own, someone akin to Sally Rooney's Frances in Conversations with Friends . . . But King also situates Casey inside a variation of the which-lover-will-she-choose framework of, say, Nancy Meyers's film Something's Gotta Give . . .The novel is a meditation on trying itself: to stay alive, to love, to care. That point feels so fresh, so powerfully diametrically opposed to the readily available cynicism we've been feasting on . . . King wants us to keep trying, through whatever means necessary, to beat the odds." --Boston Globe

"A poignant and heartfelt novel about the effects of grief and the paths people take to get through life. I couldn't put the book down." --Seattle Times

"A down-to-earth saga of an extremely bright and likable single woman wrestling with sexual desires, emotional dreads . . . An engaging portrait of a woman confronting modern hardships." --Associated Press

"King has portrayed effectively and compassionately with well-crafted prose, evocative descriptions, and spot-on dialogue." --New York Journal of Books

"Funny and romantic and hard to put down, full of well-observed details of restaurant culture and writer's workshops. It's hard to imagine a reader who wouldn't root for Casey." --Library Journal (starred review)

"A knowing look at the pursuit of a life in the arts, with a protagonist you'll root for." --Marie Claire

"King is one of those rare writers who can entwine sadness, hilarity and burning fury in the briefest of moments." --BookPage

"An extraordinary novel . . . King beautifully documents every aspect of Casey's character. Casey's insights into the world of writing are fascinating and often humorous . . . The prose [is] linguistically sophisticated, but clean and uncluttered." --Midwest Book Review

"This novel will become a defining classic for struggling young writers." --Vulture

"A breath of fresh air, with characters that leap off the page." --Amazon Book Review

"King's gift is to suspend the reader, to make the wait for resolution fascinating." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Masterful . . . You can't put it down, and you'll feel larger and more connected once you finish it. Plus, it's funny as hell." --Dead Darlings

"King leaves no barrier between readers and smart, genuine, cynical, and funny Casey. A closely observed tale of finding oneself, and one's voice, while working through grief." --Booklist (starred review)

"[A] charmingly written coming of age story." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Intimate and vulnerable . . . Lily King's novel follows a deeply relatable protagonist navigating a whole menu of crises surrounded by a cast of genuine, vivid characters . . . The book occupies a small space but packs it to the brim with humanity." --Entertainment Weekly

"Elegant, droll. . .This meditation on the passing of youth is touching and ruefully funny." --Publishers Weekly

"King follows five critically acclaimed novels, most recently Euphoria and Writers & Lovers, with her first collection of short stories. Ann Patchett raved that the new offering 'moved me, inspired me, thrilled me. It filled up ever chamber of my heart. I loved this book.'" --The Millions ("Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2021 Book Preview")

About the Author

Lily King is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels--Heart the Lover, Writers & Lovers, Euphoria, Father of the Rain, The English Teacher, and The Pleasing Hour--as well as the story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her work has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award, the Maine Book Award, and a Whiting Award; has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Story Prize; and has been longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages. She lives in Portland, Maine.