Elizabeth Costello

"To read Costello is to understand that our mothers and grandmothers lived as passionately as we do today. You’ll think of Highsmith, Didion, Atwood, Jean Stafford, Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters, but Costello is a literary original. Read this novel with highlighter in hand—you’ll surely be marking passages to savor again later—and join me in blasting it from the rooftops: Sentence by sentence, Elizabeth Costello is as good as anyone writing fiction today.”

—K.M. Soehnlein, author of Army of Lovers

“In The Good War, Costello captures post-war America with emotional depth and storytelling verve. Atmospheric and moving, the novel lays bare the inheritances of generational experience—the intensely intimate personal choices in love and the familial wreckage of war—with characters who aim for forgiveness and understanding. Best of all, the two women at the center of this novel emerge with subtle and surprising agency, at the helms of their own lives.”

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—Lucy Jane Bledsoe, author of Tell the Rest

“The Good War is an impassioned, stylishly written story of two women—a mother and a daughter—set in mid-twentieth-century America. Elizabeth Costello’s narrative mixes elements of literary expressionism à la Thomas Wolfe, film noir, and psychedelia, conducting the reader through a nightscape of thwarted or troublingly realized desires. Along the way, Costello offers a darkly brilliant study of women’s autonomy and agency in a male-dominated and war-damaged world. The hand of a poet is visible in the composition of this stunning debut novel.”

—Andrew Joron, author of O0

“Costello has created a captivating story with richly dimensional female characters who are intelligent, lusty, and burning down all the rules. We need more female characters like these, who are not easily pigeonholed.  A rare novel that is surprising and haunting, all wrapped in gorgeous prose.”

—Nina Schuyler, author of Afterword

“Elizabeth Costello’s The Good War is the kind of once-a-decade work of fiction that compels you to reconsider everything you thought you knew about America. It’s beautifully written, mischievous and crushing. The most self-assured debut novel I’ve encountered in many a year.”

—John Wray, author of Gone to the Wolves

The Good War is the kind of novel I love but rarely find: immersive, compelling, with characters who are strong and believable and unique. The parallel stories of a mother and her daughter finding both love and independence, twenty years apart, kept me engrossed. I loved every twist and turn.

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— Martha Conway, author of The Physician’s Daughter