“Brilliant in conception and dazzlingly adept in its technical execution, Simone in Pieces proves once again that Burroway is a national treasure. She is at the height of her prodigious powers, exploring the great and enduring theme of literary art: the yearning for a self, for an identity, for a place in the universe. This is a must read.”
— Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
“In this brilliantly structured novel, Burroway presents the life of her heroine through the eyes of characters who come irresistibly to life and in turn bring Simone to life. Burroway writes with virtuosic authority about a life spanning more than sixty years; the result is both compelling and deeply satisfying. I would have followed Simone anywhere.”
— Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven
“This book is stupendous. I loved it so, so much. An assemblage, fragments that bring vividly to life a woman, an era, a world—or rather many worlds—this book is a marvel and a delight.”
— Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Treasure
“If there were such a thing as a cubist novel, Simone in Pieces would define the genre. Every chapter captures the woman at its center from a different angle, each a dazzling surprise. Burroway has found a brilliant way to portray a woman in search of herself and her dire history, lost and found many times over.”
— Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After
“A capacious novel. For more than sixty years, Simone navigates her career and relationships, working through traumas and fragmented memory, and strives for self-realization during a precarious time for a woman academic. Moving, courageous, and thought provoking, Simone’s quest is both a love story and a triumph over her childhood tragedies.”
— Yang Huang, author of My Good Son
“In the tradition of Lily Tuck and Jayne Anne Phillips, Burroway’s Simone in Pieces interrogates trauma, memory, and identity mapped across a life’s movement toward wholeness. Gripping and painful fragments allow the reader to fill in the blanks that Simone cannot—the result is both compelling and rapturous, a novel that gives voice to a life spent fulfilling but never quite becoming. Austere and haunting, this addictively compulsive novel is a must-read portrait of our age.”
— Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son
“I love this book. Each time the story baton is handed forward here, it’s with a precision and grace and élan that only Burroway has. Her instinct for what to do in the next line feels so natural, so right.”
— Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times best-selling author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
“[This] novel might also be thought of as a guide to writing fiction, putting on display a wide array of techniques for portraying a character and unfolding a story. As Simone creates collages from fragments of photographs, this novel delivers similar aesthetic surprise and satisfaction.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“A well-crafted tale of a war orphan’s decades-spanning journey of self-discovery. . . . Burroway alternates Simone’s narration with evocative snippets from other characters’ points of view.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A compelling story of love, loss, and the coincidences that make a life. . . . Readers will find themselves contemplating the trajectory of their own lives while following Simone on her long, winding road to a happy-ish ending.”
— Library Journal
“In the absorbing novel Simone in Pieces, a young refugee’s mutable identity diverts and sustains the course of her life.”
— Foreword Reviews
“In a series of slyly eloquent chapters that follow Simone Lerrante from childhood into her 60s, we see her through the refracting context of the people she meets.”
— New York Times
![](https://www.bibliovault.org/thumbs/978-0-8142-5489-9-thumb.jpg "William S. Burroughs' "The Revised Boy Scout Manual": An Electronic Revolution")
