The Shades

by Evgenia Citkowitz

Overview

Vanity Fair: This Season’s Ultimate Fiction
Vogue: A Book to Thrill, Entertain, and Sustain You


Spare and haunting, The Shades is a gripping mystery and a story of a family in crisis.

A year has passed since Catherine and Michael Hall lost their teenage daughter in a car accident, leaving them and their sixteen-year-old son, Rowan, reeling in the aftermath of the tragedy. After Rowan escapes to boarding school, Catherine withdraws from her life as a successful London gallerist to Hamdean, an apartment in a Georgian country manor, where she and Michael had hoped to spend their retirement. When a beguiling young woman, Keira, appears at the house claiming to have once lived there, Catherine is reanimated by the promise of a meaningful connection. However, their relationship soon shifts to one of forbidding uncertainty as the mysteries of the past collide with the truth of the present.

Emotionally complex and psychologically tense, The Shades raises questions about the inescapability of human nature and speaks to our deepest anxieties: the safety of those we love and the sanctuary of home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393254129
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/19/2018
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Evgenia Citkowitz was born in New York and educated in London and the United States. Her debut novella and short story collection, Ether, was a New York Times Editors' Choice. She lives in Los Angeles.

Sarah Zimmerman is an Audie Award-nominated narrator, having recorded over 100 books to date, and has an extensive theater career. She has performed on Broadway, in regional theaters across America, and in numerous guest-starring TV roles. Sarah is a graduate of The Boston Conservatory and the Old Globe/USD.

Editorial Reviews

An ancient narrative shimmers through Evgenia Citkowitz's intricately constructed debut novel, which tells the thrilling story of a modern British family haunted by ghosts of its own making. Written in cool and crystalline prose, The Shades unspools in a rational and realistic world in which all is not as it seems…Citkowitz's narrative flows seamlessly from past to present, folding time into pleats, shaking them gracefully loose.

The New York Times Book Review - Dylan Landis

05/14/2018
Citkowitz’s ethereal latest (following Ether) dissects the messy tangle of past and present in the aftermath of a young woman’s death. A fatal automobile accident involving 16-year-old Rachel and her secret boyfriend fractures the Hall family. Rachel’s mother, Catherine, remains in the family’s second home in Kent, disengaged from life and her work as a successful art gallery owner until the arrival of a mysterious young woman who claims to have lived in the house as a child. Catherine’s growing interest in the stranger after months of depressed detachment heartens her husband, Michael, who has been spending his days and nights in London and yearning for a return to easily connecting with his wife. Their reticent son, Rowan, flees to a remote, liberal boarding school to reshape his life away from his sister’s death. His sudden, passionate fixation on the threat of global warming and his decision to drop out of school jolts the family from their long patterns of uncommunicative coexistence. Citkowitz meanders through her scant plot with ample atmospheric detours through the family’s past. Her depiction of the delicate, complicated attachment of siblings is particularly touching. The prose sparkles as she unpacks emotional wounds, but the threads of story remain too hazy and incomplete to be fully satisfying. This compact family drama captures the thinly masked desperation of grief with an eerie undercurrent. (July)

Publishers Weekly

A dense, powerful novel…[The Shades] is only Citkowitz’s second book…but it reads like the work of a writer with a much lengthier pedigree.

Vogue

This psychological thriller explores the mysteries surrounding a family still reeling from profound tragedy, and the terrifying uncertainty that meets their relocation in a distant country manor.

Entertainment Weekly

An absorbing book by an author who knows how to create organic suspense with out ever overplaying her hand.... both intricately plotted and perfectly paced.... An excellent debut novel that deals heavily with death, but still feels alive, compassionate and full of truths.

NPR

If you’re looking for a mystery to keep you on the edge of your seat, add this electrifying new novel by Evgenia Citkowitz to your reading list.

Southern Living

[A] thrillingly hushed and haunted novel.... For all its quiet, gripping work, this book is not without suspenseful turns of plot.... Brilliantly constructed, The Shades is ghostly and alive, cerebral and sensuous, an absolutely riveting read.

|Los Angeles Times

An elegantly unnerving first novel.... Written in cool and crystalline prose, The Shades unspools in a rational and realistic world in which all is not as it seems.

New York Times Book Review

This haunted tale follows a couple mourning the loss of their teenage daughter.... [The Shades] harkens back to such ghostly thrillers as du Maurier’s Don’t Look Back.

Crimereads

When an intriguing young woman turns up at the family’s country house and strikes up a relationship with the family’s matriarch, Catherine, a mystery is set in motion, lending the firmly contemporary The Shades a quiet echo of such classic psychological thrillers as The Turn of the Screw and Rebecca.

Vanity Fair

[A] thrillingly hushed and haunted novel.... For all its quiet, gripping work, this book is not without suspenseful turns of plot.... Brilliantly constructed, The Shades is ghostly and alive, cerebral and sensuous, an absolutely riveting read.

Los Angeles Times

I have never read a novel in which the events are recounted with such subtle interweaving back and forth through time, building up a deeply woven texture of thought and emotion. A brilliant piece of story-telling.

Tim Pears

The Shades compels with searing intensity. This extraordinary myth-like novel, about a family’s loss and unraveling, will live on in your imagination for a long time. Evgenia Citkowitz is a remarkable writer.”

Claire Messud

The Shades is an elegant meditation on marriage, grief, and loss. In cool and beguiling prose, with a style all her own, Evgenia Citkowitz’s taut and powerful novel is part mystery, part psychological portrait, and every bit engaging.”

Maria Semple

Evgenia Citkowitz has written a haunting novel about love and loss that moves fascinatingly back and forth across the borderlines of reality and myth. Her bold use of the cultured English upper middle class as the setting for a savage reimagining of Orpheus and Eurydice marks her out as a gifted, original writer.

James Lasdun

The Shades is an elegy that reads like a fever dream of loss, a jewel box that enthralls.”

Bruce Wagner

Evgenia Citkowitz’s The Shades is not a first novel; it is a tour-de-force, a powerful, wicked, compassionate, and beautifully written account of the dangers we keep in our head and heart, including love. Citkowitz, a master of mood, alters our vision of what fiction is, or should be, by altering our perception of its possibilities in page after glorious page in this startling and startlingly original book.”

Hilton Als

With a deceptively light touch and an almost ethereal atmosphere, debut novelist Citkowitz delves deeply into themes of loss and grief, reality and illusion, and growth and stagnation…[The Shades] is richly layered with meaning and allusions to myth and art that make it an engaging and rewarding read.”

Booklist

★ 2018-04-16
A couple begins to unravel after the sudden death of their 16-year-old daughter in Citkowitz's (Ether, 2010) haunting portrait of unsparing grief.In the year since Rachel was killed in a car accident alongside her secret boyfriend, her parents have retreated into separate worlds. Catherine, a high-powered gallerist, a tastemaker, has taken up residence at their aged country house in Kent, where once they'd planned to retire—a thought now inconceivable. Michael remains at the family home in London; there has, he reflects, always been "a remoteness that created a space between them that he never understood," though the gulf is wider now, the initial wave of grief having worn off. Meanwhile, their teenage son, Rowan, sweet and stoic, has fled to boarding school, having made the arrangements for his escape himself. And so Catherine is alone when a mysterious young woman arrives at the house, claiming to have lived there as a child. She is reinvigorated by the girl, striking up what she believes to be the beginnings of a friendship. But the relationship soon darkens; the girl, Catherine learns, may not be who she seems. Though the novel is short, with nothing extra, it seems to encompass lifetimes: Time and space expand and contract, the present blurring seamlessly—unsettlingly—with the past. We learn about Catherine's parents, her father's art, her mother's suicide; her courtship with Michael; the day of Rachel's death. But we also see the present: the marriage and the house; Rowan becoming increasingly obsessed with climate change at school. The mystery of the girl and the novel's murky ending are arguably the least interesting elements of the book, which is driven less by the naked plot than by the exquisite strength of Citkowitz's writing—spare, arresting, and emotionally precise.A thoroughly modern novel with a Gothic feel; a fully realized vision.

Kirkus Reviews

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