"A fresh new voice in fiction." -Pat Conroy
"Deeply affecting and compulsively readable, The Fifty-First State displays Lisa Borders' emotional acuity, first-rate skills as a storyteller, and profound empathy not only for her two compelling main characters but for an oft-neglected region and a disappearing way of life."
-Christopher Castellani, author of All This Talk of Love
"The Fifty-First State is an embrace of a novel-warm, intimate, enveloping-and, like all the best embraces, it starts with a thrill and ends before you are entirely ready to let go. I read it in one sitting and would have found a way to do the same even if it were twice as long."
-Yael Goldstein Love, author of The Passion of Tasha Darsky
"Lisa Borders is a writer of fine emotional intelligence and boundless compassion for her characters. In The Fifty-First State, a story of finding family after devastating loss, estranged siblings Hallie and Josh face problems so credible and realized that I worried for them as if they were friends of mine, and they surprised me in the way friends do."
-Sheri Joseph, author of Where You Can Find Me, Stray, and Bear Me Safely Over
"The Fifty-First State is a riveting, intricately detailed, passionate novel, with a powerhouse pair of characters that will fascinate and perplex you from the opening page until the final gorgeous paragraph. Lisa Borders is a writer who not only understands how to break your heart, but also how to piece it together again."
-Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin and We Disappear
"A novel that begins with a bang and settles achingly into the remnants of grief for those left behind-two near strangers who must learn how to knit a new kind of family together, all within a poisoned landscape in which even the smallest of creatures carry the mark of the past in their deformed limbs. The metaphor is pitch-perfect, the novel honest and plain-spoken, large in its ambitions, with a voice that bends itself without a hitch to the weight of its character's sorrows and resilience. With The Fifty-First State, Lisa Borders has done it again."
-Michelle Hoover, author of The Quickening
"A big-hearted novel about the surprises-big and small, tragic and gloriously sweet-that turn the tables on seemingly quotidian lives. The Fifty-First State is a place where good news and fluke disasters live side by side, whether in the lurking menace of a sorry neighbor or the shifting nuances of developing love. That is to say, a delightfully realistic world readers will enthusiastically recognize as their own."
-Daphne Kalotay, author of Sight Reading
"The Fifty-First State is a place of tenderness and terror, with beautiful vistas of generosity of heart. I read this novel in one sitting, moved by its deeply imagined coming-of-age story, grateful for a writer whose compassion is matched by her talent."
-Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
