Glass Shatters

2016 USA Best Book Awards: Literary Fiction, Finalist

“[Meyers] weaves a strange pattern of beautifully detailed memories, tragic events, and science into an unforgettable tale of loss, longing, and the reality that one tries to escape in order to move on.”
Booklist

Charles Lang is a renowned scientist whose wife Julie and daughter Jess vanished mysteriously several years ago. Yet Charles remembers none of this, not even his own name. All that he has left of his identity are the accidental remnants scattered throughout the house, and the only clue Charles has regarding what happened to him is a thick cap of bandages wrapped around his head. As Charles starts to have memories of the past, memories that may or may not be his own, he realizes that only by uncovering the details of his former life will he have any hope of being reunited with Julie and Jess.

A haunting tale of love and longing, of fate and free will, of the blurring lines between fiction and reality, Glass Shatters explores the dangers of trying to reinvent oneself. With the lyricism of Nicole Krauss, the exhilarating suspense of Kazuo Ishiguro, and the Gothic sensibility of Mary Shelley, Michelle Meyers’s debut novel showcases a daring new voice in the contemporary literary landscape.

Author: Michelle Meyers

Publication Date: April 12, 2017

 

Description

2016 USA Best Book Awards: Literary Fiction, Finalist

“[Meyers] weaves a strange pattern of beautifully detailed memories, tragic events, and science into an unforgettable tale of loss, longing, and the reality that one tries to escape in order to move on.”
Booklist

“Glass Shatters is about fate versus free will, fiction versus reality.”
―Bustle

“With gothic undertones and lyrical prose, Glass Shatters is a must read for anyone interested in the unreliability of narrative, the construction of the self, and the way that memories can sometimes haunt.”
Foreword Reviews, Editor’s Pick in Literary Fiction

Glass Shatters is a puzzle, one that both the reader and the book’s narrator pick apart, deliberately circling a set of images, mere reflections, and shadows hinting at the truth, until reality comes devastatingly into focus. Meyers busts the detective story into pieces and digs through these shards to dissect memory, identity, and what it means to be alive.”
―Brandi Wells, author of This Boring Apocalypse

Glass Shatters is unlike any novel I’ve read before. It’s an inventive, daring, and remarkable debut that pushes the edges of fiction with tremendous success. Michelle Meyers is certainly a writer to watch.”
―Ivy Pochoda, Visitation Street

“About a trail of lost and found memories in a world of genetic science, each sentence in Glass Shatters is as crystalline and vivid as recall can get. Tightly plotted, it carefully walks and then fancifully deviates from the scientific through line, making both the novelist and science journalist in me applaud.”
―Rebecca Coffey, author, Hysterical: Anna Freud’s Story

“A puzzle and a page-turner, Glass Shatters invites readers into a dark investigation of one man’s attempt to recover his memories and identity. Michelle Meyers has expertly crafted an engrossing novel with a sophisticated blend of art, science, and emotion, one that is ultimately an imaginative elegy on the arresting forces of love and loss.”
―Gallagher Lawson, author of The Paper Man

Glass Shatters, the truly uncanny, memorable novel of (among other things) memory presents itself as a transparent tale that soon (it does grow on you) transmutes into the translucent transcendental shades of Poe and Dick and James at his supernatural-est. This is domestic hyper-realism, turning ever irreal at the edges. The book is a magnificent machine, machining the senses and sensation. Michelle Meyers splinters feelings, running them through the ringer, a sieve so fine-tuned one begins to see the tinge and tint that spark, right there, off the spectrum, just out of insight.”
―Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana

“Bold ideas explored with verve and imagination. Meyers is unafraid of taking the reader to bizarre and unexpected regions of this and other realities, along the way exploring the strangeness of existence.”
―Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

 

About the Author

Michelle Meyers is a fiction writer and playwright born and raised in Los Angeles. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Literary Arts and Theatre Arts from Brown University, where she studied with Brian Evenson. Michelle’s writing has been published in the Los Angeles Times, DOGZPLOT, jmww, Grey Sparrow Journal, and Juked, and her flash fiction was selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions of 2014. Her plays have been developed and/or produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, the Berkshires, and elsewhere. Michelle is currently a 2015 PEN Center Emerging Voices Fellow in Fiction and is heading to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa this fall to begin her MFA in Creative Writing. Glass Shatters is her first novel.

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