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Bookseller recommendation
“I firmly believe I will be hard-pressed to pick up a book in 2019 I love more than The Need, a genre-bending novel that explores motherhood and identity. Molly is the most authentic character I’ve had the pleasure of reading in quite some time, accompanied by baby Ben and lively Viv, the most fully realized fictional four-year-old ever. Is The Need a fever dream, a psychological thriller, a cosmic twist of fate unveiling a parallel world? The author leaves her readers to wonder while highlighting the dualities of domestic life. In gorgeous prose, Phillips shows how the mundane is often revealed to be just that, but sometimes that mundanity is sacred. A deeply immersive human story.”
— Hanna Yost • Northshire Bookstore
Bookseller recommendation
“THE NEED is a thriller about the sheer emotional and physical intensity of mothering and perhaps a rip in the time space continuum. Phillips is a gifted lyrical creator of worlds. Not for the faint of heart and wonderfully absorbing.”
— Rachel • Avid Bookshop
***LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION***
“An extraordinary and dazzlingly original work from one of our most gifted and interesting writers” (Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Glass Hotel). The Need, which finds a mother of two young children grappling with the dualities of motherhood after confronting a masked intruder in her home, is “like nothing you’ve ever read before…in a good way” (People).
When Molly, home alone with her two young children, hears footsteps in the living room, she tries to convince herself it’s the sleep deprivation. She’s been hearing things these days. Startling at loud noises. Imagining the worst-case scenario. It’s what mothers do, she knows.
But then the footsteps come again, and she catches a glimpse of movement.
Suddenly Molly finds herself face-to-face with an intruder who knows far too much about her and her family. As she attempts to protect those she loves most, Molly must also acknowledge her own frailty. Molly slips down an existential rabbit hole where she must confront the dualities of motherhood: the ecstasy and the dread; the languor and the ferocity; the banality and the transcendence as the book hurtles toward a mind-bending conclusion.
In The Need, Helen Phillips has created a subversive, speculative thriller that comes to life through blazing, arresting prose and gorgeous, haunting imagery. “Brilliant” (Entertainment Weekly), “grotesque and lovely” (The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice), and “wildly captivating” (O, The Oprah Magazine), The Need is a glorious celebration of the bizarre and beautiful nature of our everyday lives and “showcases an extraordinary writer at her electrifying best” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Helen Phillips is the author of five books, including the novel The Need, a National Book Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book of 2019. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her debut collection, And Yet They Were Happy, was named a notable collection by The Story Prize. An associate professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson and their children. Visit HelenCPhillips.com.