It Will End with Us

Newsweek's Favorite Books of 2014

Praise for Sam Savage:

Winner of the O. Henry Prize for "Cigarettes"

"Sam Savage manages to be both artful and literal-minded in this faux autobiographical tale of childhood and a mother afflicted and finally driven mad by her wish for artistic success. Savage writes knowingly about the uncertainties of childhood memory, but creates a convincing world of sibling combat and adult pretension. A wonderful, absorbing novel."--C. Michael Curtis, Fiction Editor, The Atlantic Monthly

"If the world--all its hysteric noise--was muted for just one minute, Sam Savage is what you might be fortunate enough to hear. His elegant laconism, his leaps across the self-evident, his soft aplomb, and the rarified air he bestows upon the mundane make him the only American writer worthy of the label the true eccentric."--Valeria Luiselli

It Will End With Us is Sam Savage's latest deep dive into the mind and voice of a character, and his most personal work yet. Brick by textual brick, his narrator, Eve, builds a memorial to the mother who raised her, emotionally abandoned her, and shaped her in her own image. Eve's memories summon a childhood in rural South Carolina, a decaying house on impoverished soil, and an insular society succumbing to the influences of a wider world. It Will End With Us is a portrait of a place full of hummingbirds and wild irises, but also of frustration and grief. It is the story of a family tragedy, provoked by a mother's stifled ambitions, and seized by the wide-open gaze of a child. Rarely has a novel so brief taken on so much, so powerfully.

Sam Savage is the best-selling author of Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan
Lowlife, The Cry of the Sloth, Glass, and The Way of the Dog, all from Coffee
House Press. A finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Award, Savage holds a PhD in philosophy from Yale University and resides in
Madison, Wisconsin.