Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Aug 2019
352 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
An insightful and sparkling novel that opens on a college campus and follows the friendship of four women across life-defining turning points.
Assigned to the same suite during their freshman year at Quincy-Hawthorn College, Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret quickly become inseparable. The leafy green campus they move through together, the idyllic window seat they share in their suite, and the passion and ferocity that school and independence awakens in them ignites an all-encompassing love with one another. But they soon find their bonds--forged in joy, and fused by fear--must weather threats that originate from beyond the dark forests of their childhoods, and come at them from institutions, from one another, and ultimately, from within themselves.
The Other's Gold follows the four friends as each makes a terrible mistake, moving from their wild college days to their more feral days as new parents. With one part devoted to each mistake--the Accident, the Accusation, the Kiss, and the Bite--this complex yet compulsively readable debut interrogates the way that growing up forces our friendships to evolve as the women discover what they and their loved ones are capable of, and capable of forgiving. A joyful, big-hearted book that perfectly evokes the bittersweet experience of falling in love with friendship, the experiences of Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret are at once achingly familiar and yet shine with a brilliance and depth all their own.
"Written in a deft omniscient narration, the novel's first half can sometimes blur the characters together within its slippery point of view...But the novel sharpens when the women come into independent adulthood...A messy, but ultimately memorable, look at the moral gray areas that govern our choices." - Kirkus Reviews
"Though there are moments of powerful emotion, and the details and emotional crises are well drawn, most readers will feel frustrated by the meandering plot and the characters' choices." - Publishers Weekly
"[An] impressive debut... . Ames's well-drawn characters and startling prose will linger with you." - Real Simple
"[The Other's Gold is] an ode to the turmoil and joy of female friendship, and the perfect book to read with your friends." -Bustle
"This novel will resonate with anyone who guards an inner circle forged in dorm rooms and dining halls, but it is also, in the end, more than that." - Vogue
"A sharply-drawn portrait of a lifelong friendship, The Other's Gold follows four young women bearing past traumas and navigating unimagined futures. With an uncanny eye for detail, Elizabeth Ames charts the complex, ever-shifting topography of this 'chosen family'—and illuminates the ways our closest friends sustain us over the course of our lives." - Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere
"One of the most immersive, unsettling books I've read in a long, long time. For hours after I finished it, the book felt realer to me than my own life did...I was devastated by it. I loved it." - Kristen Roupenian, author of You Know You Want This
This information about The Other's Gold 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.
Elizabeth Ames is graduate of the University of Michigan MFA program, where she won the Hopwood Award. Her short stories have appeared in Ninth Letter and Third Coast. She currently lives in a Harvard dormitory with her husband, toddler, and a few hundred undergraduates. This is her first novel.
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