Your Father Sends His Love

by Stuart Evers

Overview

Your Father Sends His Love heralds the powerful American debut of a bold new literary talent.

Stuart Evers writes with uncanny psychological acuity. The inventive, elegant stories in Your Father Sends His Love illuminate the precarious and electrifying connections between parents and children. Evers’s unforgettable characters long to repair relationships that have faltered or that never quite began. A single father goes to jail for avenging a hate crime perpetrated against his gay son; a mother returns home to her husband and children after an affair; an aging grandfather mediates between his quarreling son and granddaughter; a man waits at the pub, frantically listing things he might say to a suffering friend.

With wit, subtlety, and uncommon sensitivity, Evers captures those pivotal moments between parents and children when emotions are urgently felt yet impossible to express. In this, he explores new realms of passion and estrangement. With his precise, energetic prose, Evers crafts a group of stories that explore familial love in all of its forms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393285161
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/18/2016
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

A former bookseller, Stuart Evers is the award-winning author of Your Father Sends His Love, Ten Stories About Smoking, the acclaimed novel If This Is Home, and, most recently, The Blind Light. He lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

…[an] austere, tragicomic collection…Evers's work is generally rooted in the real world, but he shines when he veers into sci-fi territory…his stories reverberate long after the final page.

The New York Times Book Review - Rachel Syme

10/26/2015
Evers’s latest is a collection of 12 stories centered on family. In “Lakelands,” the young victim of a hate crime copes with the imprisonment of his father, who has attacked the perpetrators of the crime. In “Wings,” a woman tries to conceal from her family a tattoo that she has gotten in memory of her sister. Doing things for family—out of love or fear—is a theme that runs through these stories, with particular success in “Live from the Palladium,” about a single mother trying to push her flailing son into the unforgiving world of stand-up comedy, the same profession his deceased father once had. “Swarm,” a futuristic story about the darker side of live-streaming, is inventive. The dialogue throughout the collection is a bit flat and formal, and sometimes characters can barely be distinguished from one another: the grandfather in “These Are the Days,” for instance, sounds like a mournful composite of elderly characters we’ve met before and sounds especially similar to the father in “Lakelands.” There are nice, memorable moments in these stories, but like the characters, they begin to run together. Agent: Lucy Luck, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Proof that the story form remains in rude health. Quietly brilliant and moving."

Ian Rankin

"Evers’s everymen break my heart."

Eimear McBride

"A thrillingly inventive collection of stories about alienation and longing and dread. Stuart Evers writes with great subtlety about all the ways we estrange ourselves from the people we love and about the rare moments of grace in which we somehow stumble home again."

Jenny Offill

"Wit is a precision weapon, and Stuart Evers is astonishingly precise. It takes an enormous and well-calibrated brain to put together a collection like Your Father Sends His Love. It is one of the funniest—savagely funny, tenderly funny—and therefore one of the most moving books I’ve read in a long time."

Teju Cole

2015-10-15
These short stories explore varieties of family strife and warmth in a style with roots in Raymond Carver but more humor, sympathy, and sinew. In the opening story, "Lakelands," a man recalls revealing his homosexuality when he was a teen to his laborer father and lying about why he was beaten up by a group of youths. The interplay of guilt, understanding, hope, and violence reveals that this British writer (If This Is Home, 2012, etc.) has many colors and layers on his canvas. "Frequencies" begins with a catalog of observations that signal a father's anxiety over the infant he's minding while his wife travels for work, the boy who came after years of failed efforts to conceive. When he hears a voice speaking in the baby monitor about raising children, the percolating anxiety turns tangible, eerie, and recalls John Cheever's "Enormous Radio." Most Carver-esque and more charming than effective is "What's Going on Outside," in which two men on some kind of surveillance discuss how one peels and eats oranges, among a very few subjects. Evers is generally good with simple relationships: the retired man and granddaughter of "These Are the Days"; the mother who encourages her son to do stand-up comedy in "Live from the Palladium." The title story also touches on the entertainment world, as a TV personality dwells in a past that includes one handicapped son and one estranged one. It's an ambitious piece that shifts between London and Thailand and comes, with heavy irony, to focus on notebooks containing years of jokes that the father considers "his true legacy." This is an uneven gathering but free of duds, and Evers often achieves the special pleasure of short stories, infusing small worlds with more life than seems possible.

Kirkus Reviews