Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2016
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A boldly candid, raw portrait of a young woman's search for meaning and purpose in an indifferent world.
Decisively aimless, self-destructive, and impulsively in and out of love, Elsie is a young woman who feels stuck. She has a tumultuous relationship with an abusive boyfriend, a dead-end job at a newspaper, and a sharp intelligence that's constantly at odds with her many bad decisions. When her initial attempts to improve her life go awry, Elsie decides that a dramatic change is the only solution.
An auto-didact who prefers the education of travel to college, Elsie uses an inheritance to support her as she travels to Paris and Sri Lanka, hoping to accumulate experiences, create connections, and discover a new way to live. Along the way, she meets men and women who challenge and provoke her towards the change she genuinely hopes to find. But in the end, she must still come face-to-face with herself.
Whole-hearted, fiercely honest and inexorably human, Wreck and Order is a stirring debut that, in mirroring one young woman's dizzying quest for answers, illuminates the important questions that drive us all.
"Starred Review. The book has a broad appeal, and many young women will keep it stacked on their bookshelf...and cart it with them like a talisman." - Publishers Weekly
"Often unsettling, sometimes funny, always meticulously observed; a quietly intoxicating novel that resists easy answers." - Kirkus
"'Read this carnal picaresque novel for – its daring, its passages of unsparing self-interrogation, its sharp rendering of locale and lives in Sri Lanka. Not every kink in this young woman's quest is made straight by the time you reach the end, but that's the way you want it to be when you get there." - Norman Rush, National Book Award winning author of Mating and Subtle Bodies
"I alternately feared for and applauded the darkly funny young woman at the center of this stunning debut." - Amy Hempel
"Wreck and Order is suffused with an essential intelligence that makes even the most challenging of journeys sing." - Rivka Galchen
"A fearless, far ranging exploration of a contemporary young woman's sexuality and ambition, which covers continents, includes even a proper engagement and questions the nature of happiness and endings." - Mona Simpson
"In this raw and compelling debut, Hannah Tennant-Moore has created a woman savagely at odds with herself: a heroine who's anything but, for these strange times." - Claire Messud
This information about Wreck and Order was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Hannah Tennant-Moore's work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, n+1, Tin House, Salon, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and has twice been included in Best Buddhist Writing. She lives in the Hudson Valley.
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