Here They Come

I can imagine both Jane Austen and Raymond Carver pouring over this masterly novel of a girl's coming-of-age in 1970s New York (Frank McCourt). From the National Endowment for the Arts Award-winning author of the New York Times Notable Book, The Sea of Trees, comes the shockingly funny (Vanity Fair), wholly unsentimental but peculiarly hopeful portrait of family love and growing up scarred but sturdy (LA Weekly). Splitting time between her off-kilter family in a garbage-strewn apartment and a lonely hot dog vendor who trades Hershey bars for questionable favors, the pragmatic and absolutely fearless thirteen-year-old Smitty stands firmly grounded in a city that is stifling, violent, unpredictable, and full of life. It's not easy to stay balanced. Not with two precocious sisters, a pothead brother, a depressed but steel-willed mother, an infirm grandmother, and an idler dad who's vanished with his appallingly stupid mistress. Now, with dark humor, deadpan resilience, and a quiet sense of the surreal, Smitty recounts a remarkable chain of events that will make this the most transcendent year of her young life. In Here They Come, the PEN New England Award-winning Yannick Murphy flawlessly captures a child's-eye view of a battered society and a battered family (Los Angeles Times), creating a world as magical and harrowing as the struggle to come to grips with maturity (Publishers Weekly, starred review).