Very Cold People (Paperback) - Sarah Manguso

Acclaimed writer Sarah Manguso makes her fiction debut with an icy, furious novel about the way in which a society can ignore and enable the abuse of young women, narrated by the daughter of just such an abusive mother.

Guardian's Best Fiction of 2022
'One of the most original and exciting writers working in English today' - Jhumpa Lahiri

Once home to the country's most illustrious families, Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is now an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape, Ruthie learns how the town's prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history and how silence often masks a legacy of harm - from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends.

In Very Cold People Sarah Manguso reveals the suffocating constraints of growing up in a very old, and very cold, small town. Here lies a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smouldering rage . . .

'Chilling . . . deeply impressive' - Guardian
'A masterclass in unease' - The Observer

Longlisted for the Wingate Prize 2023

About the Author

Sarah Manguso is the author of 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, The Two Kinds of Decay, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, Siste Viator, and The Captain Lands in Paradise. Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and her books have been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Her poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series, and her essays have appeared in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review. She has taught graduate and undergraduate writing at institutions including Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Scripps College, and the University of Iowa. She lives in Los Angeles.