What Falls Away

Praise for What Falls Away by Karin Anderson

"A powerful novel that will resonate with anyone who has returned to a place they no longer recognize as home."
--KIRKUS REVIEWS

"Sharp, poetic prose... her story commands attention."
--FOREWORD REVIEWS

"Anderson brings us a vision of what family and redemption can and should look like, if we get real, as real as the desert demands that we be. Outstanding."
--JOANNA BROOKS, author of Book of Mormon Girl

"Read this book. It'll change how you feel about family. And if you have thought, as I have, that the biases, judgments, and practices of extreme Mormon culture have nothing to do with you, What Falls Away will change how you experience salvation, too."
--JULIE J. NICHOLS, Association for Mormon Letters

"No contemporary novelist renders the apostates and patriarchy of the American West with more life and depth than Karin Anderson."--CHARLIE QUIMBY, author of Monument Road

"Resisting an easy restoration to compensate for loss, Anderson challenges notions of community, belonging, and generational ties to the land."
--DANIELLE BEAZER DUBRASKY, author of Drift Migration

"Exceptional in every way. This novel's literary ambitions are completely fulfilled in what will likely become a classic of Western literature. Don't miss this treasure."
--STEVEN L. PECK, author of The Scholar of Moab
This book swallowed me whole. I expect to re-read it many times."
--MICHAEL WILLIAM PALMER, author of Baptizing the Dead and Other Jobs

"Anderson balances the potential for violence with the potential for healing. The resulting tension kept the reader engaged to the surprising end."
--JOHN BENNION, author of Spin

"Like her main character, Cassandra, Karin Anderson is a "she-coyote"--a truth-teller and a trickster--who fearlessly enters the rocky terrain of family, religion, and patriarchy, to bear witness to a nightmarish collection of ages-old outrages born by women. If Cassandra is a priestess who learns to draw images of what family, belonging, and healing might be, then Anderson is a visionary who understands the transformational power of story."
--KAREN AUVINEN, author of Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living

Praise for Before Us Like a Land of Dreams by Karin Anderson

"A narrative extravaganza that ponders the bristled roots of ancestry, unbroken by time or place, and the muddled truths and fallacies of family history that inform who we believe we are. This masterwork flouts expectations."

--FOREWORD REVIEWS (starred review)

"This resonant novel is told in a multitude of voices, forming a family saga that is both a revisionist history of Latter-day Saint settlement in the American West and a personal journey."

--KIRKUS

"Anderson's fictionalized journey through time was prompted by her mother's declining health, her son's hospitalization, rampant wildfires plaguing the region, and a beloved country severely divided. A work of universal appeal."

--LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)

"Anderson bravely wrestles abandoned and underrepresented histories onto the page...a veritable index of abandoned history, almost like the second telling of what should have been included with the first."

--15 BYTES

"Anderson explores the thorny entanglements of family, religion, and self, asking--with crisp, evocative prose--what portion of our lives do we direct, and what portion rests upon the 'dark hazards' of ancestral preordination?"

--JANA RICHMAN, author of The Ordinary Truth

"A magnificent orchestra of voices--piercing and holy, naked and singing, ragged and wistful and queer--but each voice, in turn, fiercely intimate and finely wrought."

--NATE LEIDERBACH, author of Beasts You'll Never See

"A warmhearted and chilling collection of true family stories that are fiction and fictional stories that are true. Anderson deploys voices from the American West as idiosyncratic as the Southern voices that make up Faulkner's As I Lay Dying."

--SCOTT ABBOTT, author of Wild Rides and Wildflowers

"Through language rich in metaphor, that is as rhythmic and melodic as a poem, Anderson reveals to her readers that family is more than genetics, home is more than place, and understanding is always fragmented."
--LAURA HAMBLIN, author of The Eyes of a Flounder

"Anderson's keen prose shreds the myths of American history...a stark and truthful reckoning with white legacies."

--MICHAEL WALSH, author of The Dirt Riddles

"Literary and true, this is the hardest--and best--kind of book, taking no prisoners, forgiving nothing, demanding all. Read it to confirm your membership, fierce and fragile, in the great imperfect human race."

--JULIE NICHOLS, author of Pigs When They Straddle the Air