08/24/2020
Glass (Peach) delivers a slim, dreamy sophomore novel about a sleep-deprived nurse. While working night shifts in a neonatal ward in London, Laura and her colleagues swaddle infants, care for them in their first moments of life, and watch as sick babies die from incurable ailments. When Laura is not working in the ward, she is at home with her partner, a man who seems to not love her or want her near (“The television is blaring. You are drowning out the world with loud sounds and whisky,” Laura narrates in a second-person passage addressed to him). In semi-waking moments, Laura begins seeing a haunting figure from her dreams: “in the pitch black her face shines sickly white, picked out by a shard of moonlight.” When Laura starts seeing the figure in the hospital whenever a death occurs on the ward, she worries she is going mad. Glass’s prose perfectly elicits the restless waking torment that drapes over Laura. The novel is visceral, and readers will keep turning the pages in fascinated dread. Agent: Niki Chang, The Good Literary Agency. (Dec.)
"You should read this book because it gives explosive and overdue literary consideration to medical personnel. . . Glass stokes her first-person writing to a sumptuous tumult. . . I love how unself-conscious [she] is. . . she makes brave commitments, and gives to them everything she has." - New Yorker's Critics 10 Favorite Fiction Books of 2020
“A visceral and dreamlike literary portrait of a burned-out pediatric nurse working night shifts in a neonatal ward.” —USA Today
“In Glass's trademark, lyrical style, it follows a woman on the edge-a night-shift nurse in a pediatric unit who may or may not be seeing things.” —LitHub, Most Anticipated Books of 2020
“Atmospheric and eerie, Rest and Be Thankful is full of Glass's poetic observations, and will leave you thoroughly haunted and entranced.” —Refinery29
“Glass wants readers inside Laura's body, tasting seawater in her nightmares of drowning, feeling her limb-heaviness as she falls asleep at a friend's kitchen table. Such richness makes all of Glass' writing stand out, but this glimpse into the world of nursing feels like a true literary rarity. . . A heart-wrenching and poetic look at a profession that deserves more literary attention.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Gorgeously written ... It's heartbreaking but beautiful, and perfect for escaping into.” —Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine
“A slim, dreamy sophomore novel. . . Glass's prose perfectly elicits the restless waking torment that drapes over Laura. The novel is visceral, and readers will keep turning the pages in fascinated dread.” —Publishers Weekly
“This second novel from Glass, a writer and nurse, explores trauma as poetically, inventively, and incisively as her debut, Peach, this time from the perspective of pediatric nurse Laura. … Across her emotionally tender, titled chapters, Glass grants readers access to the many-dimensional Laura, so strong but struggling to care for herself as unreservedly as she cares for others.” —Booklist
“Glass maintains [a] fragile balance with poetic yet direct language, in a text anchored by epigrammatic chapter headings that makes this hallucinatory (yet all too graphically real) book click. It reads almost like a thriller as Laura's mind slips. During our own time of heightened crisis, this bracing, even brutal, novel dresses you in the uncomfortable scrubs and clogs of one who has witnessed horror but then washed up to begin work again.” —Boston Globe
“Dynamo . . . a pungent piece of writing, tactile and sensory to the extreme . . . a lived-in portrait of a hardworking woman pushed to the fringes of her mind, where she keeps finding new reserves of strength, and a reminder that literary heroism takes many different forms.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A haunting, intimate portrayal of the nurses who sacrifice their physical and psychological well-being for the sake of others. . . a visceral, disturbing, and sometimes oh-so-tragic reminder that as a community we need to do more for our care-givers globally – that a round of applause is simply not enough.” —Locus Magazine
“I need you all to read this so we can have an Alma book club to discuss the ending. I'm not joking!!! Someone talk to me about the ending of this book!!” —Alma
"Glass’s Rest and Be Thankful powerfully describes what it means to be a health-care worker. . . [the novel] functions as a powerful document, a testament to the silent class of first responders who risk their safety in exchange for scattered 7 p.m. applause during a pandemic. Glass’s short book ably meets the ponderous inquiries of caregiving in a tribute to both fragility and forbearance." - Washington Post
"Glass, who also works as a nurse in London, tells this story in poignant vignettes and anchors this slim novel in the hospital workplace where the protagonist, who doubles as the first-person narrator, works in the newborn department." - The Seattle Times
"Glass, from her vantage point as a nurse and a gifted young author, makes much of an awesome opportunity to report from the front lines of a quiet war . . . [her] intimate knowledge of nursing can make her details feel breathtakingly authentic." - Los Angeles Times
"The prose is incantatory and prickly, slipping almost imperceptibly into the mode of a horror story. It takes a minute to fall into the book’s rhythm, but once you do, it’ll make the hairs on the back of your brain stand up." - Vulture (NY Mag) Newsletter
"I was humbled to be in Laura’s dreams. The ending wades out onto the shore, glad you were able to witness it." - Feminist Book Club
07/01/2020
A nurse at Evelina London Children's Hospital, Glass follows up Dylan Thomas Prize long-listee Peach with Rest and Be Thankful, a timely if sometimes eerie tale of a pediatric nurse suffering burnout as her life shifts uncertainly and a mysterious figure dances at the edge of her vision (30,000-copy first printing). Surfacing every six or seven years with titles that earn superlatives, the Alex Award-winning Maltman (Night Birds) here offers The Land, a literary-noir crossover featuring dropout/programmer/caretaker Lucien Swenson, recovering from a car accident in the last months of the 20th century. His search for a former lover leads him to a white supremacist church and strange encounters with wolves, angry ravens, and a shadowy woman. In Tell Me How To Be, Patel's follow-up to the NPR best-booked If You See Me, Don't Say Hi, Los Angeles-based songwriter Akash leaves Los Angeles (and the boyfriend he keeps secret from his family) and returns home to Illinois when his widowed mother sells the family home. He plans to pack his things, mourn his father, and mend family ties, but he didn't anticipate meeting his first romantic interest and falling in love again. (35,000-copy first printing). The heroine of Pulitzer Prize winner Smiley's Perestroika in Paris is a high-spirited filly who wanders from her stall at the racetrack and makes her way to the heart of glorious Paris, befriending a venturesome German Shepherd, a gaggle of ornery birds, and a boy named Etienne who lives in the ivy-clad seclusion of his great-grandmother's home. But how long can a horse named Paras (short for Perestroika) remain at liberty in the big city? By Spanish author Vilas, the No. 1 internationally best-selling autobiographical novel Ordesa features a schoolteacher who has returned to his hometown in the Pyrenees to reassess his life. Retired, divorced, and mourning his deceased parents, he looks honestly at loss and the meaning of life now defined mostly by memory.
★ 2020-08-04
A London pediatric nurse struggles not to let her job consume her.
Laura is trying to make it through a week of night shifts at the hospital children’s ward. She has time off coming up, if she can just fight her way through the exhaustion to get there. But as the novel begins, Laura’s world is falling apart. The man she lives with—addressed throughout in the second person—has become standoffish and irritable; the fact that they work opposite shifts doesn’t help the drift between them. At work, a baby’s health worsens rapidly, and Laura has to navigate the minefield of patients, their families, the doctors and other nurses she works with, and a cluelessly cheerful med student. She is beset by poor sleep and haunted by nightmares. Worst of all, she is seeing things: a woman in black like the specter of death itself, appearing in the Tube, the hospital, and in Laura’s dreams. As things continue to deteriorate, Laura is less and less sure that her nightmare, waking or otherwise, will ever end. Readers familiar with Glass’ debut novel, Peach(2018), will recognize her inimitable style here: elliptical and lyric with an intense interiority. Glass wants readers inside Laura’s body, tasting seawater in her nightmares of drowning, feeling her limb-heaviness as she falls asleep at a friend’s kitchen table. Such richness makes all of Glass’ writing stand out, but this glimpse into the world of nursing feels like a true literary rarity. Glass, a nurse herself, takes both standard nursing tropes and revelations about the work and brings them all to shimmering life. “We are cotton buds sucking up the sadness of others,” Laura says of nurses, “we are saturated, we are saviors.”
A heart-wrenching and poetic look at a profession that deserves more literary attention.
