A brilliant debut about faith, family, grief, love, temptation and redemption from a striking and original American voice

He was not the sort of man to do such a thing. This was something he knew, unquestionably, deep in his heart. If ever he was to turn into one of these men, he would not do it with the daughter of his best friend, however terrific she looked in her skirt and blouse, and then, later, without her skirt and blouse. In The Book of Life, as in life, moments of unsettling tension and grief sit alongside those of humour and happiness. There are uncompromisingly awkward situations, there are tales of broken bonds and the struggle for redemption, and there are huge betrayals — including the man who sleeps with his best friend's daughter. Stuart Nadler is a fresh voice, a writer in the great American tradition, but one who emerges from the shadows — of Updike, of Bellow, of Cheever — and stakes his own bold and exciting claim. 'Funny and tragic and old-fashioned and brand spanking new, all at once.' Oprah Magazine 'Find of the Month' 'Betrayal and forgiveness infuse this impressive debut collection ...Nadler skillfully creates characters whose failures and faults make them comically, endearingly human.' New Yorker

Review
“In ”The Book of Life", Stuart Nadler offers a fresh, funny, perceptive take on the current state of the Jewish family, including the families we make with our friends and lovers. Like Bernard Malamud, Nadler has a gift for comic/ironic dialogue and for setting thoroughly modern characters on a collision course with the distant past. A truly talented writer."—Sharon Pomerantz, author of Rich Boy

Stuart Nadler is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. Recently, he was the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared in the Atlantic.