"With deep truth and immediacy, Gail Godwin illuminates an indivisible marriage--its experience, passion, thought, and wit; and its sundering into loss, longing, and remembrance. For such closeness, there should be a word beyond love."
--SHIRLEY HAZZARD
"With words alone, Gail Godwin has created an important piece of music about a love which death can only increase and deepen. Yes, and Frances Halsband's illustrations are a haunting countermelody."
--KURT VONNEGUT
"
Evenings at Five reads like a novel, but it's a fictionalization of a real event. Gail Godwin uses all the weapons of art to deal with her own all-too-real grief, and the result is a rigorous exercise in restraint, control, irony, memory."
--The Washington Post Book World "A LITTLE MASTERPIECE . . .
DEXTEROUS, STRONGLY FELT, MULTI-LEVEL WRITING."
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Asheville Citizen-Times "[A] heartrending book . . . Brilliantly webbed scenes fill its pages . . . Godwin writes with enormous clarity and unvarnished prose. She writes, in other words, not to approach the truth but to forcefully ascertain it."
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Book magazine
"Possibly her truest book . . . There is a quiet dignity here that pulls you into the two people's lives. . . . Full of wicked humor and sage and subtle advice, laced with achingly familiar refrains of love and loss,
Evenings at Five could well restore a bereaved man's or woman's sense of self."
--The Roanoke Times "An exquisite portrait of a thirty-year relationship . . . There is a depth and intensity within that many large tomes never capture. . . . Just as Christina ultimately knows she has to move on, one assumes Godwin needed to write
Evenings at Five to move on and work on another outstanding novel."
--South Florida Sun-Sentinel "QUIRKY, WRY, AND SURPRISINGLY POWERFUL . . .
with a delight in words and the ways people use and abuse them that is typical of this urbane author."
--Publishers Weekly "If asked to list my ten favorite American fiction writers, Gail Godwin would be among them. In this, her latest . . . she evokes in a short book the long married life of two artists.
Evenings at Five is a strong tale of love-after-death."
--NED ROREM
"The
New York Times bestselling author of
Evensong has scored again. . . . The novel, which can be read in one sitting, is an excellent showcase of Godwin's talent. Those not already Godwin fans are apt to be converted."
--The Sunday Oklahoman "Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved."
--FREDERICK BUECHNER
"The most balanced heart-rending book you ever read on the nature of loss, loneliness, and grief."
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Desert News "INTIMATE AND TOUCHING."
--Kirkus Reviews "A fierce evocation of what--at some time or another--everyone is bound to endure. . . . An amazing little volume that contains an explosive emotional wallop."
--ROBB FORMAN DEW
"An unflinching account of love, loss, grief, and the struggle toward consolation. It should touch every reader with its emotional power."
--ELIZABETH SPENCER
"No one does the nitty-gritty of soul-searching like Gail Godwin. . . . [She] is one of the few contemporary novelists willing to tackle the ticklish (to modern writers) topic of religion in real life. In a novel inspired by her own experience, she does it again, beautifully."
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BookPage "Godwin accomplishes more in this smart, arch, and charming little illustrated novel than many of her peers do in far heftier volumes."
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Booklist