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A tender debut that follows a woman who, after her best friend's death, loses her faith and quits her job to join the postal service, quickly becoming an 'essential worker' as the city shuts down.
It's January 2020, and Miriam is already getting a sense that the world might be ending. First, she learns that her best friend, Esther, has died. Then her faith in God-in everything, really-follows suit. Her job teaching Scripture at a private Christian school suddenly seems untenable, so she quits. Thankfully, the postal service is hiring.
While Miriam finds comfort in her route, the mail truck can hardly outpace the memory of her lost friend and eroded faith. She finds herself composing letters to Esther that she will never deliver, reflecting on their shared childhoods and deep understanding of each other's difficult families.
Mendell Station depicts one woman's deliverance through the peculiar rhythms of work, and the beauty found in small details and gestures, those quotidian labors of love.
"Gentle and meticulously observant, the novel pays tribute to the ways in which thoroughly mundane experiences can serve as a form of grace. A quietly hopeful depiction of the bumpy process of recovery from loss." —Kirkus Reviews
"Striking and understated...Hwang delivers glimmering insights into the nature of grief. This leaves a mark." —Publishers Weekly
"Hwang, who delivered mail during the pandemic, offers a true-to-life look at the haze of grief, the uncertainty and confusion of early 2020, and the inner workings of the postal service." —Booklist
"With astonishing dynamism and empathy, JB Hwang's Mendell Station accomplishes a great deal over its humble page count, painting a moving flash memory about the earliest days of the covid-19 pandemic, imbued with the sometimes subtle, sometimes overwhelming grief that often accompanies the human experience of pain that can't be fully understood." ―Jinwoo Chong, author of I Leave It Up to You and Flux
"Tender, tender, tender. A raw slice of life that will leave you weeping. A magnifying glass into the seesaw of female friendships and the grief that comes with it. Hwang has firmly established herself as masterful storyteller." ―Carolyn Huynh, author of The Fortunes of Jaded Women and The Family Recipe
This information about Mendell Station 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.
J.B. Hwang received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Florida, and her short fiction and translation can be found in The Temz Review, The Denver Quarterly, Oxford Magazine, and December Magazine. She lived in San Francisco for eight years and worked as a mail carrier during the pandemic. She currently lives in Philadelphia.
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