The Sunken Cathedral

From the National Book Award nominee and author of the acclaimed, New York Times bestselling A Short History of Women, a deeply moving, &;lyrical, ominous, and unexpectedly funny&; (Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers) novel that follows a cast of characters as they negotiate one of Manhattan&;s swiftly changing neighborhoods, extreme weather, and the unease of twenty-first-century life.

Marie and Simone, friends for decades, were once immigrants to the city, survivors of World War II in Europe. Now widows living alone in Chelsea, they remain robust, engaged, and adventurous, even as the vistas from their past interrupt their present. Helen is an art historian who takes a painting class with Marie and Simone. Sid Morris, their instructor, presides over a dusty studio in a tenement slated for condo conversion; he awakes the interest of both Simone and Marie. Elizabeth is Marie&;s upstairs tenant, a woman convinced that others have a secret way of being, a confidence and certainty she lacks. She is increasingly unmoored&;baffled by her teenage son, her husband, and the roles she is meant to play.

In a chorus of voices, Kate Walbert, a &;wickedly smart, gorgeous writer&; (The New York Times Book Review), explores the growing disconnect between the world of action her characters inhabit and the longings, desires, and doubts they experience. Interweaving long narrative footnotes, Walbert paints portraits of marriage, of friendship, and of love in its many facets, always limning the inner life, the place of deepest yearning and anxiety. The Sunken Cathedral is a stunningly beautiful, profoundly wise novel about the way we live now.

"The Sunken Cathedral is impressionistic, a bookof drifting shadows and blazing clarity; Kate Walbert has written a gorgeousand moving requiem for a people and a city that are not yet lost. Amagnificent achievement."--Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia and Monsters of Templeton

Praise for The Sunken Cathedral

"The Sunken Cathedral is a gem of a novel--lyrical, ominous, and unexpectedly funny. Kate Walbert has somehow managed to write an elegy for a Manhattan that still exists, and characters who--like most of us--would prefer not to think about their impending doom."--Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers

"Kate Walbert's frightening, timely novel follows an achingly particular cast, small flames unexpectedly doused, so that the prevailing uncertainty of what it is to be alive rises like the waters flooding coasts. The insufficiencies of sheltering-in against Sudden Weather turn Who We Are Stories into Who Are We plaints, yet Walbert is wise and funny and compassionate, and she gifts The Sunken Cathedral with birds and strokes of blue. 'Much to learn from blue, ' a painter considers, and much to learn from this ambitiously made, great fiction."--Christine Schutt, author of Florida and All Souls

"Hypnotic...though the novel seems to be set in the present, it feels more menacing than our current world, with sudden, dangerous stormsand terrorism drills in school. An unconventional and unsettling novel withvivid imagery and passages of pure poetry."--Library Journal, starred review

"[A] sense of a remembered world that lives on just beneath the ever-changing surface is at the heart of Kate Walbert's stunning new novel, The Sunken Cathedral. A powerful elegy for a fading New York City and for the planet as a whole, it is also a deeply human story, full of rich and complex characters...[Walbert] writes with such precision that she's able to pack 80 years worth of personal and world history -- war, climate change, marriage, parenthood, friendship, death, grace, love, petty betrayal, and sudden violence -- into a slim volume. She's also very funny... the footnotes work beautifully...audacious...masterful."--J. Courtney Sullivan, The Boston Globe

"Walbert writes unlike anyone I've read before, imbuing each of her finely-tuned sentences with stunning detail. Trust me: You won't ever have been more eager to read the footnotes in your life."--Bustle

"Insightful...Like so many elements of this rich new novel, its title points backward and forward... though Walbert never allows her narrative to dissolve into stream of consciousness, she manipulates time and space as though they were as viscous as oils. And she allows the central plot to drip off the edges of this canvas. That effect is structurally emphasized by footnotes that read like little prose poems of ineffable grace... Some of these notes are long, taking up more than two pages, and some contain incidents as moving and significant as anything in the main text of the novel, a strategy that implicitly challenges what's central and what's tangential in our lives... Walbert's narrative method is a gentle lesson in empathy, a reminder that it's only artifice and egotism that give us the misimpression that we're the central protagonist of the life we're composing."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Kate Walbert's TheSunken Cathedral paintsan elegant picture of a LowerManhattan neighborhood and its citizens, at risk from both 'suddenweather' and relentless gentrification."--Shelf Awareness

"A brief book with limitless depth, TheSunken Cathedral usesfootnotes to move between past and present, thought and action. Set in New YorkCity, most of the voices are female, starting with two 80-ish widows whoventure out to take an art class.--The Houston Chronicle

"Walbert tunes in toa complex chorus of female characters in contemporary Manhattan, a cityrecently altered by climate change, tragedy and new wealth...The tapestry ofvoices weave a rich pattern, and the novel is strengthened by Walbert's use offootnotes, which allow her characters' thoughts to move freely from the presentto the past, uncovering private or previously unshared memories...TheSunken Cathedral is a reference to a piano sonata by Debussythat itself alludes to the mythical story of a cathedral that rises up from thesea. Like Debussy's impressionistic music, the novel is poetic, full of lyricalimagery and subtle shifts of tone. Ambitious, elegiac and occasionally even funny, TheSunken Cathedral is an emotionally resonant story of people caught ina time of unease and change--and a striking portrait of the way we livenow."--Lauren Bufferd, BookPage