“This beautifully written story is going to get you thinking about some things that really matter. The story leaves you questioning the obligations of marriage and the difference between male and female friendships, and one of the most significant of questions: How do you want to spend your last days?” — Oprah Winfrey
“A moving meditation on love’s many forms and how a marriage can surprise you—right to the end.” — People Magazine
"Harrowing, but brilliant." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Packer's gorgeous, deeply involving novel is a suspenseful and radiant reckoning with love, sorrow, and the everlasting mystery of death." - Booklist (starred review)
“We stay in the mystery of this couple, with its shades and shifts. And in the final pages, with their small, quiet turns, we have the readerly satisfaction of a good ending, that elusive and beckoning goal.” —The New York Times
“Ann Packer's first novel in a decade finds the American author again pursuing a deceptively simple premise: A long-married couple must prepare for and confront their final weeks together before death comes for one of them. But don't be fooled by the saccharine-sounding summary. As Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan explained in a review of Packer's previous novel, The Children's Crusade, the author has a knack for turning what might have been 'mundane mass-market fiction' into a rich, splintered narrative that 'illuminate[s] the unexpected depths of the commonplace.'" — NPR.org
"Packer sketches the nuances of [Claire and Eliot's] love with a devastating sharpness, poignantly exploring the challenges of facing death with grace." — The Washington Post
"Readers already know Ann Packer for her acutely sensitive novels of families in crisis, and her latest, Some Bright Nowhere, . . . takes on the anguish of a long-married couple whose deathbed conversations raise profound questions about love, commitment, and sacrifice." — The Boston Globe
"Packer specializes in domestic dramas that arise from tragic dilemmas for which there are no great solutions. . . . It feels like Packer has a deep understanding of the complex emotions she portrays in Some Bright Nowhere. And like we’ve been given privileged access to a horrible situation we’d all like to keep confined to the pages of a book." — The Minnesota Star Tribune
“I couldn’t stop reading this heartbreaking, heart-expanding novel, and I wept at the end. Ann Packer writes with courage, humor and insight about what it means to be fully human and what we owe the people we love most. Unforgettable.” - J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of The Cliffs and Friends and Strangers
"Readers, you will shed tears and talk long into the night about this book. What can we ask of one another? What can we give? What is love in the face of death? Profound and moving and real, Packer has written another stirring account of the heart." - Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less and Less Is Lost
"Some Bright Nowhere is a devastating novel that miraculously floats with the light and life it carries. I read it feverishly; I lived and mourned with its characters." - Aysegül Savas, author of Long Distance and The Anthropologists
"Some Bright Nowhere is an exquisite gem of a novel, shot through with luminous prose and profound insight into the human heart. Trust me: you’ve never read a novel about marriage—about sacrifice and selfishness and soul-mending hope—quite like this one. I loved it." - Tania James, author of Loot
Some Bright Nowhere by Ann Packer is a tender story of marriage, family and home. Ann joins us to talk about shifting perspective, community, character, moral dilemmas, influences and more with host Miwa Messer. This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with […]