In Other Lifetimes All I've Lost Comes Back to Me: Stories
"A deep and howling portrait of longing and loneliness." --Boston Globe
"A distinctive debut from a promising author." --Kirkus Reviews
"A stunner from the very first page." --Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, in the Millions
And praise from Ann Patchett, Alice McDermott, Danielle Evans, Elisa Albert, and Aimee Bender
In "To Do With the Body," the Museum of Period Clothes becomes the perfect setting for a bloody crime. In "Lilith in God's Hands," Adam's first wife has an affair in the Garden of Eden. And in the title story, a woman spends her life waiting for any of the men who have left her to come back, only to find them all at her doorstep at once.
For readers of Elena Ferrante, Nicole Krauss, and Carmen Maria Machado, and for anyone who has known love and loneliness, In Other Lifetimes All I've Lost Comes Back to Me is a wise and sensual collection of old hauntings, new longings, and unexpected returns, with a finale that is a rousing call to the strength we each have, together or alone.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
"Sender shifts between stories of love--between lovers, friends, family, ghosts--and the great looming shadow of the Holocaust, making a deep and howling portrait of longing and loneliness."
Boston Globe
"Sender's willingness to explore primal hurts makes her fiction compelling. . . . A distinctive debut from a promising author."
Kirkus Reviews
"Sender's intimate worlds explore the hollows of the real and imagined, bringing to life emotions and connections too unwieldy to define or restrain."
Booklist
"Courtney Sender hooks us with her singular magic. . . . Brilliantly aching and haunting."
Sara Lippmann, Lilith blog
"Brooding, poignant. . . . The sharp humor and imagination in these stories helps to temper the aching loneliness of people who are in various phases of losing, rejecting, or longing for love."
Foreword Reviews
"A stunner from the very first page."
Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, in the Millions
"Sender matches the light topic of youthful lost love with the extreme heft of the Holocaust . . . and comes up with a miraculous balance between the personal and the universal."
Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
"Wholly original, lyrical, fierce, these stories confound expectations at every turn. Courtney Sender writes about passion and loneliness, faith and longing, heaven and hell with a clear eye and a compassionate wit. This collection expands and celebrates, even as it sometimes upends, what it means to tell a love story."
Alice McDermott, author of The Ninth Hour
"Courtney Sender's stories are fierce and tender, exploring the urgency of desire, the restlessness of longing, and the way that both trauma and the will to survive can be a haunting inheritance. Sender moves gracefully between the surreal and the everyday, capturing the way romantic love can be at once impossibly strange and mercifully familiar."
Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections
"Trust is the soul of these stories, and it flows both ways: the trust Courtney Sender has in her reader and the trust the reader feels deeply and truly in the hands of such a generous, intelligent, offbeat, singular writer. These stories, structured in an utterly original way, are rare and real; they get under your skin."
Elisa Albert, author of Human Blues
Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade
