Winner of the O. Henry Prize for "Cigarettes"

Newsweek's Favorite Books of 2014

Included in Library Journal's "25 Key Indie Fiction Titles, Fall 2014-Winter 2015"

"Reading the novel can feel like admiring dewdrops on a spider's web, each paragraph and sentence glittering exquisitely. . . . Savage's is a book of the heart as much as the head. Which is itself an accomplishment of no small note: to recognize the arbitrary, degraded thing that is memory, and allow it its loveliness for all of that." --New York Times Sunday Book Review

"If the world--all its hysteric noise--was muted for just one minute, Sam Savage is what you might be fortunate enough to hear. His elegant laconism, his leaps across the self-evident, his soft aplomb, and the rarified air he bestows upon the mundane make him the only American writer worthy of the label the true eccentric." --Valeria Luiselli

"A Southern childhood in duskier, Tennessee Williams times, offering an aphoristic scattering of memories--one- and two-sentence stand-alones that spill isolated down the page like little gems . . . showing us how memory works and how we make sense of our lives, drip by drip and sensation by sensation." --Library Journal

"Savage's lean, meditative novels, so meticulously pitched and poised, eschew the bloated excess and garish dazzle that can mar those from writers half his age. . . . In Savage's novel, or Eve's 'inventory of tiny things, ' it is the small, fleeting and quiet details that speak volumes." --Star Tribune

"To call the book a novel, however, fails to acknowledge the poetry in its form." --Carolina Quarterly

"Savage constructs novel from scattered memories." --Wisconsin State Journal

"Sam Savage, once more, elicits our admiration and aesthetic appreciation for reminding us not to be complacent, and to interrogate what Eve terms the 'inner reaches'--our inner selves--and what we believe, in a compact with others, to be the real world." --Numero Cinq

"A small book that tells a huge story about a Southern woman's memories of her mother and a vanishing world." --Shelf Awareness

"The narrative perfectly replicates the capriciousness of memory." --AskMen.com

"A novel written in a most unusual way: a series of brief paragraphs which sometimes read like diary entries, other times like descriptions from a book of recollections. The mosaic effect is enhanced by the author's skillful use of language, his vivid, poetically-charged prose style." --Lively Arts

"As Savage indicates with philosophical acumen . . . the private symbol is a myth." --Schooner

"Sam Savage manages to be both artful and literal-minded in this faux autobiographical tale of childhood and a mother afflicted and finally driven mad by her wish for artistic success. Savage writes knowingly about the uncertainties of childhood memory, but creates a convincing world of sibling combat and adult pretension. A wonderful, absorbing novel." --C. Michael Curtis, Fiction Editor, The Atlantic Monthly

"Savage's stylistic movements around structure and prose helps texture this narrative and make the emotional vulnerability of Eve even more resonating. . . It Will End with Us is a beautiful portrait of a woman who attempts to recreate