The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story

A San Francisco Chronicle and NPR Best Book of the YearThe author of the acclaimed memoir The Suicide Index returns with a virtuosic collection of stories, each a stirring parable of the power of love and the impossibility of understanding it. Spanning centuries and continents, from eighteenth-century Vienna to contemporary America, Joan Wickersham shows, with uncanny exactitude, how we never really know what's in someone else's heart--or in our own.Review :Best Books of 2012, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus ReviewsWise and courageous and often brilliant...breaks new ground in our perceptions of what a short story can be. Wonderfully imaginative and original. - Boston GlobeAn ode to heartbreak and regret...Wickersham's gift is for capturing the habits of mind that lead even smart people to deceive themselves...her book makes you slow down and listen, and then watch for people to reveal themselves. - New York Times Book ReviewElegantly structured, emotionally compelling...Short stories don't get much better than this. - Kirkus ReviewsDo not mistake Wickersham's exquisitely polished prose for good manners. Although she writes with a vintage grace...she is brutal and funny too...Divine. - San Francisco ChronicleVirtuosic...Wickersham [takes an] emotional cannonball into every single one of her characters. The doubts and tenderness they share are ones that only the finest fiction can create. - Oprah.com Book of the WeekWickersham makes a triumphant return to fiction...articulates subtleties of human behavior that ordinarily elude language altogether. - ElleMunro's and Wickersham's books are at the top of this year's pile. - Chicago TribuneSo moving it will close your throat. - LA TimesThe prose is beautiful, and you feel those characters like real people. - Cheryl StrayedA master of the written word and storytelling in all its forms. - BookPageJoan Wickersham has done it astonished, enchanted, and moved me. - Julia GlassGorgeous, completely original...As soon as I finished it, I began to read it again. - Andre GregoryAs skilled as Alice Munro in maneuvering her characters, and the reader, through time...Highly recommended. - Library Journal