AudioFile
Listeners will be fascinated by the origin story of the Sawtelle family…Poe’s distinctive characters, tone, and pacing perfectly reflect the storyline.”
Newsday
If you’ve read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, you know that no one writes about dogs with more insight than Wroblewski…This great American novel bustles with life, and if it takes all summer to read it, who cares.”
PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of Secrets Joan Silber
No writer understands the depths of dogs’ natures the way David Wroblewski does, and once again we have a vital, absorbing, and remarkable fiction fueled by this understanding. Familiaris is a rare novel, modest and epic.”
Ron Rash
David Wroblewski is one of the few contemporary authors who can create a world that the reader doesn’t merely visit but fully inhabits. And what a world it is, rich with love and joy and heartbreak. And wonder, especially in the way human and canine form inseparable bonds. It has been a long wait for a new Wroblewski novel. The wait is worth it.”
Richard Russo
‘Suppose you could do one impossible thing,’ John Sawtelle says in David Wroblewski’s stunning new novel Familiaris. What would you do? Clearly, what the author would do and has done is write this impossibly wise, impossibly ambitious, impossibly beautiful book.”
Tom Hanks
By taking us back to the origins of the Sawtelle family, Wroblewski has set a storytelling bonfire as enthralling in its pages as it is illuminating of our fragile and complicated humanity. Familiaris is as expansive and enlightening a saga as has ever been written.”
New York Times bestselling author of The Road from Margot Livesey
Like many readers, I adored The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, with its gripping tale of treachery and the magnificent Sawtelle dogs. Now I adore Familiaris. David Wroblewski is a wonderfully inventive writer; he knows so much—how to test a tractor, how to make a table, how to borrow money, how to see the future—but best of all he is a writer of extraordinary characters, human and canine, who will take up residence in your mind and heart. A dazzling and irresistible novel.”
National Book Award winner and author of Apeirogon Colum McCann
Tender, ambitious, fierce, deeply human, and of course wonderfully canine, David Wroblewski’s second novel is an American tour de force. There were moments when reading that I thought of Russo, Irving, Strout, McCarthy, Gilbert, and then just Wroblewski himself. A story spun out over generations, to be read for generations, this is a big brave book that is old fashioned in the very best sense of the word."
BookReporter
At the center of the book is a huge barn; a cozy, warm home; and two characters whose hearts are filled with love, courage, a sense of humor, and a bright burning desire to bring something beautiful into the world. Dogs.”
Colorado Book Awards
An epic novel with an expertly crafted setting and dialogue, and characters so rich, layered, and undeniably human, it will have you racing through the pages.”
Barnes & Noble
A tender feat of humanity, loyalty, and hope, Familiaris is a quietly stunning, atmospheric prequel story that explores the history of mankind’s ambition (and the millennia-long interspecies bond that got us here).”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Spellbinding…This warm, big-hearted novel pays tribute to the joys of curiosity and creation and turns out to be surprisingly funny, even as storm clouds gather on the family’s horizon.”
Esquire
Mythic in its proportions and riveting in its finely textured portrait of life in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, the Great American Novel vaults Wroblewski into the rarefied company of epic storytellers like Cormac McCarthy and Gabriel García Márquez.”
Post and Courier
Moving, funny, heartbreaking, mysterious, and magical…[an] unforgettable journey.”
KRCU Public Radio
If you’re looking for well-written story you can lose yourself in, then you must read Familiaris by David Wroblewski.”
The Weekly Reader (WYPR) Marion Winik
I am just one of the legions of fans who has been waiting since 2008 for another book by David Wroblewski. Good news: Familiaris is here…You can dive into this massive reading project assured of a good time…You’re going to be sad when it’s over.”
Oprah Winfrey
An extraordinary journey that brilliantly interweaves history, philosophy, adventure, and mysticism to explore the meaning of love, friendship, and living your life’s true purpose.”
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Spellbinding…This warm, big-hearted novel pays tribute to the joys of curiosity and creation and turns out to be surprisingly funny, even as storm clouds gather on the family’s horizon.”
author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin Colum McCann
Tender, ambitious, fierce, deeply human, and of course wonderfully canine, David Wroblewski’s second novel is an American tour de force. There were moments when reading that I thought of Russo, Irving, Strout, McCarthy, Gilbert, and then just Wroblewski himself. A story spun out over generations, to be read for generations, this is a big brave book that is old fashioned in the very best sense of the word."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-02-03
A great American novel of people and passions and ideas—and, of course, dogs.
For the many fans of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (2008), this ambitious and captivating prequel focuses on that character’s grandfather, John Sawtelle. Its nearly 1,200 pages begin in 1919 when John, who has been working as a road-tester at a car factory, finds a perfect piece of land when his jalopy breaks down in middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin, where he surprises his dog, Gus, by walking 63 yards on his hands. John won’t take possession of this inspiring tract for another 300-some pages, necessary to introduce the key characters and elements Wroblewski has invented to populate his cabinet of wonders. Characters include a giant carpenter named Elbow; a World War I amputee named Frank Eckling; John’s brilliant and sensitive soulmate, Mary; a logger named So Jack Von Osten and his huge horse, Granddaddy, who can both count and give romantic counseling. Elements: none more important than a fictional 1897 volume called Practical Agriculture and Free Will by George Solomon Drencher, the source of John’s conviction that life’s purpose is to “Seek, seek, seek—the Singularism!” John’s singularism is of course encapsulated in the breed of dog he and Mary will eventually develop, the Sawtelle dog; you’ll wait another few hundred pages for that to emerge, but the delights along the way are manifold. Like this comparison of whiskey and brandy: “Whiskey tasted like something squeezed out of an oak plank, like mentholated gasoline. Brandy was composed of equal parts sunlight and lava. Where whiskey came home looking for an argument, brandy noticed how truly simpatico you were.” One of the darker parts of the book focuses on a terrible incident involving John and Mary’s sons, setting the stage for events readers of Edgar will recall with a chill. A hilarious and moving section toward the end—by now it’s the late 1950s—follows John’s attempts to write a book called Familiaris, in which the author may or may not reveal secrets of his craft. Already having drawn comparisons to Russo, Irving, Strout, McCarthy, and Gilbert, with García Márquez added here, Wroblewski earns them all, amply rewarding readers who have been waiting impatiently for 15 years.
For all the eons it may take to read it, this colossus of a book will own you.
