Woke Up Lonely: Book summary and reviews of Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel

Woke Up Lonely Summary

Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness in the twenty-first century. With its communes and speed-dating, mixers and confession sessions, the Helix has become a national phenomenon - and attracted the attention of governments worldwide. But Thurlow, camped out in his Cincinnati headquarters, is lonely - for his ex-wife, Esme, and their daughter, whom he hasn't seen in ten years.

Esme, for her part, is a covert agent who has spent her life spying on Thurlow, mostly to protect him from the law. Now, with her superiors demanding results, she recruits four misfits to botch a reconnaissance mission in Cincinnati. But when Thurlow takes them hostage, he ignites a siege of the Helix House that will change all their lives forever.

With fiery, exuberant prose, Fiona Maazel takes us on a wild ride through North Korea's guarded interior and a city of vice beneath Cincinnati, a ride that twists and turns as it delves into an unsettled, off-kilter America. Woke Up Lonely is an original and deeply funny novel that explores our very human impulse to seek and repel intimacy with the people who matter to us most.

Woke Up Lonely Reviews

"[W]hat's best about the novel and Maazel's skills as a storyteller...[is] her exploration of the different shades of loneliness." - Publishers Weekly

"Maazel manages to strike a number of tones here - from poignant (all Lo wants is to get back with wife and daughter) to paranoid - and she's successful at every level." - Kirkus

"Woke Up Lonely is the novel equivalent of a sonic boom - it builds, it explodes, it leaves your ears, mind, and soul ringing for days. Who else writes sentences like this, who else writes sound art prose that transports a heart-killing story of human frailty, susceptibility, loyalty, and isolation? No one." - Heidi Julavits, author of The Vanishers

"...this story is weird, thrilling, and inimitable." - Marie Claire

"Woke Up Lonely is another wunderkammer, a deeply felt and wildly original novel that...won't be soon forgotten." - Book Forum

"Brilliantly imagined." - Vanity Fair

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Fiona Maazel is the author of Last Last Chance, called "moving, buoyant, and utterly true" by the New York Times Book Review. She is winner of the Bard Prize for Fiction, a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree, and the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Residency. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Bookforum, Conjunctions, Fence, GQ, Gulf Coast, Glamour, The Millions, Mississippi Review, n+1, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Salon, This American Life, Tin House, The Village Voice, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Brooklyn College and New York University, and was appointed the Picador Guest Professor at the University of Leipzig, Germany, for the spring of 2012. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.