Here Until August: Stories - Softcover

Praise for A Loving, Faithful Animal

Long-listed for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award

Winner of Australia's Elizabeth Jolley Prize

One of The Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists

"A slim beauty . . . I found myself considering those rare things only books can do, feats outside the purview of film or fine art . . . A work of such well-defined characters, each so carefully drawn as to breathe, and a work so full of stark emotional moments . . . Gorgeous, precise language encourages inner storms . . . Like the best of Breece D'J Pancake or W. G. Sebald, Rowe plants small moments from history as a soldier might bury landmines." --Samantha Hunt, The New York Times Book Review

"Revelatory . . . Rowe's shape shifting, capturing the nuances of different nationalities effortlessly, is almost as remarkable as the precise, delicate, and frequently witty prose . . . Pitch-perfect examinations of place and psyche from a writer to watch closely." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Rowe's richly interiorized characterizations and muscular prose, of the condensed and economic variety that manages to say a lot with a little, herald her exciting U.S. entrée." --Booklist

"Balancing poetic language with unsentimental observation, [Rowe] brings a fierce, inventive vision to her themes of family, legacy, and survival." --Publishers Weekly

"A heartbreaking and memorable hero . . . A rich, kaleidoscopic depiction of inherited trauma in stunning prose." --Kirkus Reviews

"Stunning, gorgeously written . . . While the presence of pain never leaves this story, the beauty and compassion with which it's told, the deep understanding of the fierce love and shared toxicity that bind families together, makes the pain bearable, makes it important to bear witness to this tragic, gorgeously wrought story." --Kristin Iverson, NYLON

"Exquisite." --The Millions, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Month

"[A] devastating piece of literature crafted by an exceptionally talented writer who tears the lives of her characters asunder and then charts their path back together . . . Rowe is, and this can't be said enough, a remarkable writer. Her prose is a mixture of Denis Johnson's tough guy prattle and the deft, character painting of Stephen King . . . Her skill at description and setting is merely the gift-wrapping for a book that quietly, yet savagely, paints a picture of what it's like to survive, and what it takes to continue doing so." --The East Bay Review

"Contemplative and thrilling." --Zyzzyva

"One of the smarter, most lyrically written stories you'll read about a fracturing family." ―Library Journal

"With poetic prose, Josephine Rowe creates a memorable cast of characters." --World Literature Today

"A Loving, Faithful Animal lured me in with astonishing, poetic prose, and a glimpse of an Australia I don't always see in fiction. But the true thrill of the novel is the carousel of haunting characters Josephine Rowe creates with unbelievable precision. An unflinching look at the ways we fail the people we love, at the cruelty of family, its toxicity, and beauty. The book is a deep, multifaceted portrait of the inheritance of damage, one that left me aching and inspired." --Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter

"A Loving, Faithful Animal is a subtle and haunting meditation on childhood, escape, the bonds and the limits of family, and the long reach of trauma. Rowe is a serious talent, and her debut novel is both gorgeous and stunning." --Emily St. John Mandel, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Station Eleven

"A slim novel packed with delicious prose, easy to lose yourself in and hard to leave behind." --Amelia Gray, author of Threats and Isadora

"Josephine Rowe writes like someone who, having been quiet a long time, has thought carefully and viciously about what must be said. In this flinty debut, Rowe fashions a string of refractory surfaces--the family members of a veteran--to remind us just how far, into love and time, the atrocity of war will reach." --Kathleen Alcott, author of Infinite Home

"Rowe's language is trance-inducing. Do right by yourself, nest down and prepare to be swept away by these characters, their respective dilapidations, in this mesmerizing, incandescent novel. Masterful." --Brendan Jones, author of The Alaskan Laundry

"Deft, lyrical, and deeply moving." --Wayne Macauley, author of The Cook

"A compelling and singular emotional experience . . . Haunting . . . Rowe makes it clear from the first paragraph of this clenched, resolute study of family damage that sentiment has no place here. She will reveal something harder and truer." --Kate Holden, Australian Book Review

"Rowe's much-anticipated debut novel dives into the heart of a family attempting to salvage themselves from the scars of the past. Brutal and tender, this is a dark domestic drama battling with the wreckage of the Vietnam War." --Robert Bound, Monocle magazine

Praise for Here Until August

"Revelatory . . . Rowe's shape shifting, capturing the nuances of different nationalities effortlessly, is almost as remarkable as the precise, delicate, and frequently witty prose . . . Pitch-perfect examinations of place and psyche from a writer to watch closely." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Josephine Rowe demonstrates in her new story collection an uncanny ability to find moments both devastating and sublime in even the most mundane aspects of life, like a millennial Alice Munro. Each of the book's ten stories are singularly transfixing; reading them is like drifting from one lighted window to the next, bearing witness to the lives within, feeling more profoundly the darkness around you when the story ends, when you can't see inside any longer. But while you can see inside, Rowe offers exquisite, many faceted glimpses into the lives of people drifting and settled--often both at the same time--all reflecting the unnerving awareness that life's transience might be the only permanent thing there is." --Kristin Iversen, NYLON, 1 of the 34 Books You'll Want to Read This Fall

"If you liked A Loving, Faithful Animal, you should probably pick up Here Until August. (If you haven't read A Loving, Faithful Animal, you should probably also do that.) Eavesdrop on neighbors, spend some time in the Catskills, and meet a dog named Chavez in Josephine Rowe's new short story collection. In beautiful prose, she takes you to places you might think you know, and leaves you there to find your way out." --Katie Yee, Literary Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year

"The Australian author's talent for relating her very human characters' rich interior lives is even more on display than in her impressive debut novel . . . Love and loss underpin these 10 stories, which follow characters' evolving acceptance of their situations, by degrees. Often, Rowe pierces through threatening clouds with humor, especially in her genuine, clever dialogue . . . These expansive tales are bound to grip, surprise, and enrapture short-story lovers." --Booklist

"Here Until August is extraordinary. Each of these stories delivers a fully, richly textured world: images that immerse, loss and longing and love and melancholy that suffuse the page, characters who live, and sentence after sentence that astonishes. A stunner of a book." --Clare Beams, author of We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories

"Here Until August tracks the shimmer of precarious moments and transient moods with devastating precision. In their steady excavation of intimacy, these spacious stories bring Alice Munro to mind. I underlined sentence after sentence as I read: for their beauty, their clarity, and their wisdom. Josephine Rowe is a breathtakingly good writer, and this is a marvelous book." --Michelle de Kretser

"The stories in Here Until August are such rich, expansive, glorious stories, with vibrant, living characters and language that remakes the world." --Karen E. Bender

JOSEPHINE ROWE was born in 1984 in Rockhampton, Australia, and grew up in Melbourne. In the United States, her writing has appeared in Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, and Freeman's. She holds fellowships from the Wallace Stegner program in fiction at Stanford University, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Omi International Arts Center, and Yaddo. She was the winner of Australia's Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2016 and has been named one of The Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists. Her debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal, was long-listed for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award and selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice.