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Very Cold People

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Very Cold People

By: Sarah Manguso
Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
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About this listen

Longlisted for the Wingate Prize

Financial Times Best Debuts

Guardian's Best Fiction of the Year

Once home to the country's most illustrious families, Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is now an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape, Ruthie learns how the town's prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history and how silence often masks a legacy of harm—from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends.

In Very Cold People Sarah Manguso reveals the suffocating constraints of growing up in a very old, and very cold, small town. Here lies a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smouldering rage . . .

©2022 Penguin Random House LLC (P)2022 Macmillan Publishers International Limited Coming of Age Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction

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Critic reviews

"I can’t think of a writer, who is at once so formally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso." (Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man)
All stars
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An investigation into small town living. Enclosed communities and family dynamics that not necessarily create positive relationships with self and others. the effects of trauma. wanting to belong but living with a feeling you can't fit it. Even the life in Waitsfield seem bleak, each story is told in an engaging way and unfolds the effect of living there every chapter at the time.

good book

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I’m glad this book exists and that it addresses difficult stuff but avoids any bum notes. I wish authentic, meaningful writing on these areas of life didn’t have to feel so guarded, so exhausted and radiate such willed stability; but that seems to be where we are as a culture. It is well done and often poetic but its vigilance is painful.

A restrained story of a society steeped in abuse

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Not sure I fully understood this one. Felt rather bland to me. And I actually gave up which is rare.

Kinda bland

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