Critical Praise

"QUIRKY, WRY, AND SURPRISINGLY POWERFUL . . . with a delight in words and the ways people use and abuse them that is typical of this urbane author."

——Publishers Weekly

"With words alone, Gail Godwin has created an important piece of music about a love which death can only increase and deepen. Yes, and Frances Halsband's illustrations are a haunting countermelody."

——Kurt Vonnegut

"Evenings at Five reads like a novel, but it’s a fictionalization of a real event. Gail Godwin uses all the weapons of art to deal with her own all-too-real grief, and the result is a rigorous exercise in restraint, control, irony, memory."

——The Washington Post Book World

"[A] heartrending book . . . Brilliantly webbed scenes fill its pages . . . Godwin writes with enormous clarity and unvarnished prose. She writes, in other words, not to approach the truth but to forcefully ascertain it."

——Book magazine