Belinda McKeon's debut novel, Solace, won the 2012 Faber Prize, was voted Irish Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her essays and journalism have been published in the Paris Review, the New York Times, the Guardian, and elsewhere. Her plays have been produced in Dublin and New York, and she has been under commission to the Abbey Theatre. McKeon was also a nominee for the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction post. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Rutgers University.
"...this novel will have you fully immersed in one pair's riveting
emotional rollercoaster."--Harper's Bazaar
"Tender combines the urge to escape the ordinary of Brideshead
Revisited with the tormented devotion of McEwan's Enduring Love. It
is chilling, gorgeous, and profoundly insightful about the very
human urge to wreck oneself on the shoals of a great
ambition."--Matthew Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of We
Are Not Ourselves "Tender rises above every other book on the shelf
for its language alone; the beauty of each sentence will break your
heart. But the story, full of the pleasures and terrors and
betrayals of youth, will do that anyway. There is no way around it:
you will weep. Spectacular."
--Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Impossible Lives of Greta
Wells
"Tender is compelling and deeply affecting: McKeon's prose
describes the calibrations of emotions wonderfully, and the novel
is great on friendship, on art, on being young and in love... I
read it in a day."
--Nick Laird, author of To a Fault
"Tender is the best Irish novel I've read since The Spinning Heart,
a work rich with wisdom, truth and beauty. There are no gimmicks,
no deliberately eccentric characters and no wildly overblown prose
masquerading as poetry. Reading it, the novelist that came to mind
time and again was Anne Tyler, one of the greatest storytellers
alive, whose characters arrive on the page like human beings,
things happen to them, they react to these things, and then life
continues. I can scarcely think of higher praise than to say that
Belinda McKeon could be our Anne Tyler. There is simply not a false
note anywhere in Tender."
--John Boyne, The Irish Times
"Tender is written in a remarkable, fluid style that mirror's
Catherine's changing emotional state as her desire to recapture the
closeness she and James once shared consumes her daily life. A
sensual and poetic triumph."
--Lithub
"[An] emotionally virtuosic second novel, which fizzes from the
start with effervescent comic dialogue... breathtaking."--Boston
Globe
"[McKeon] fills these early pages with cascading phrases that flex
with the enthusiasm of young love.... McKeon brings this story to a
close with such tenderness and honesty.... Anybody can feel the
real life pulsing through this novel about misaligned
affections."--Ron Charles, Washington Post
"A dreamy and absorbing story ...McKeon's novel is rife with
psychological insights and truths large and small about the
betrayals and passion between friends."--Travel and Leisure
"A perceptive, unexpectedly moving novel about friendship and love
and all the heart-stopping moments in between."
--Jenny Offill, bestselling author of Dept. of Speculation
"An invigorating and lifelike novel that earns its
title..."--Flavorwire
"Belinda McKeon writes like a dream, and Tender proves that she
belongs among the most revered novelists working today."
--Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock
"Belinda McKeon's new novel takes the prize for having one of the
most exquisite endings I've read in some time...Well before you
reach the well-earned, absolutely perfect ending, McKeon lets you
know unequivocally that this is a book about a rare
connection...moving."--NPR
"Belinda McKeon's second novel is an honest and, at times, painful
account of what its like to be young and crazy in love." --US
Weekly
"Belinda McKeon's second novel, Tender, concerns a type of
contemporary relationship pop culture loves to depict but can never
seem to resist catastrophically oversimplifying: a close friendship
between a gay man and a straight woman.... What McKeon does in
Tender is something far more refreshing, though.... Tender
preserves the emotionally (and physically) heightened experience of
young love and first heartbreak.... The book becomes a time bomb as
soon as Catherine's love for James and the impossibility of him
feeling the same way about her are both apparent, but it's the care
with which McKeon manages that explosive, the details of how and
when and why it finally detonates, that give the story its
devastating force.... But there's so much more going on in the
book, too. Tender pulls together friendship and love and sex and
politics and coming of age and finding one's calling in one messy
bundle that resists all easy labels besides, possibly, "youth."
Like the title, that word has many meanings, and every single one
of them is tied to a sensation."
--Flavorwire
"Dark spirits inform the frantic heart at the center of Tender,
Belinda McKeon's second novel and a dead-on account of youthful
obsession...in her [Catherine], McKeon has a fully-realized
character--a contradictory, willful, thoughtless, self-destructive,
manipulative, obsessive, and finally, sympathetic young
woman...such youthful sensations as the longing to be known wholly
and exclusively by another McKeon remembers and tenderly
records."--New York Times Book Review
"Everyone remembers the exquisite torments of first love - and
you'll revisit them in McKeon's haunting story of na�ve Catherine,
brooding James and their college friends in 90's Dublin. These
smart, likable people misunderstand, wound and obsess about one
another. Their yearnings and screw-ups as they stumble toward
adulthood make for a bewitching read."
--People
"McKeon follows her much praised debut with a fever dream of
friendship, love, and obsession that is as emotionally raw as it is
artfully crafted."
--Booklist, starred review
"McKeon is a superb and sophisticated writer, who captures the
barely articulable feelings between young people on the brink of
adulthood."
--Fiona Wilson, The Times (UK)
"McKeon relates an unpredictable series of events in heart-rending
prose, expressing the full force of a young love's potential for
disaster."--New Yorker
"McKeon...captures something essential about friendship,
vulnerability, love, and longing. As it explores the push-pull of
this achingly intimate, increasingly obsessive relationship-the way
James and Catherine attract and repel each other as if they were
two strong magnets turned this way and that-the story throbs with
the tension between them.... McKeon regards the characters in her
keenly wrought love story-for all their flaws and fragility-with
insight, sensitivity, and a compassion that proves
contagious."--Kirkus, Starred Review
"McKeon's description of human obsession is raw, her literary
references to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes are relevant, and her
introspective magnifying glass into one woman's psyche will stay
with you long after putting the book down."--Glamour
"Richly nuanced and utterly absorbing."
--The Guardian
"This carefully constructed tale of loss and betrayal thrums with
sadness, danger, and the dizzying desire to possess."
--Financial Times
"This insanely beautiful novel digs deep uncovering so much truth
below the surface, however... and if you do cry, don't say I didn't
warn you."--Bustle
"Utterly exquisite, unflinchingly observed, Tender is the story of
a specific obsessive love, but also the story of youth itself, the
blinding needs of heart and body, the illusion that one can change
reality to suit one's desires--just by wanting to enough. McKeon's
intelligence and insight shine through every page, and the words
themselves perform miracles of revelation as they dance from one
sentence to the next."
--Robin Black, author of Life Drawing
"With the mastery of Anne Enright...McKeon delivers a tragic and
heartfelt second novel. The subtle narrative pacing and deep
descriptions of both Dublin and the characters and their
distinctive habits believably convey the often heartbreaking
initiations of young adulthood."--Library Journal
"You'll feel immersed in the textured, nuanced exploration of the
fraught emotional territory of relationships and the stress that
time puts on them-and just might be able to relate."--Elle
"1990s Dublin was still a very conservative place, McKeon's
pitch-perfect second novel reminds us, and her story of a
passionate, defining friendship between an aspiring poet and the
charismatic photographer's assistant that turns savagely
proprietary has the ring of painful truth about it."--Vogue
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