Emily Barton

Reviews & Praise

“Brookland is most obviously a historical novel, painstaking in its carefully researched and vividly imagined reconstruction of a vanished world, peopled by families with old Brooklyn names like Schermerhorn, Joralemon, and Hicks. But it is also a novel about the fragility of family ties, about ghosts—architectural as well as human—and about the sacrifices that artists are willing to make in order to fulfill their dreams. . . . ”
—Christopher Benfey, the New York Review of Books

Read the original review: The New York Review of Books

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“No historical novel in recent memory has amassed such an imposing wealth of rich period detail, and few novels of any genre extend an increasingly absorbing story to such a powerful, sorrowful conclusion. A brilliant book that should be a strong Pulitzer Prize contender.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A] magnificent epic. . . . Barton's second novel is a breathtaking, heartbreaking mix of gender-busting innovation and the story of decent people living enormous lives in a close family whose secrets lead to explosive tragedy. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

“A major New York book of the season.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“. . . everything that stymies the the goal-oriented reader--unhurried essays on antique gin-distilling techniques, verbatim chunks of sermons, phalanxes of peripheral characters--makes Barton's stately period piece . . . a treat for the rest of us. In her account of an extraordinary woman's life in Brooklyn circa 1800, Barton has re-created the borough's brief pastoral moment in such lavish, precise detail that I can't think of a single recent historical novel that compares. . . . While female detectives may exercise their faculties in contemporary thrillers, mainstream fiction heroines engrossed in challenging jobs--as opposed to challenging cads--are rare. Which makes Brookland that much more of a rare delight. Grade: A-”
—Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly

Read the original review: Entertainment Weekly

“[A] capitvating tale . . . seamless, period-rich prose.”
—Vogue Magazine

“At the narrative center of Brookland, Emily Barton’s second novel, is a drawing—a sketch of the bridge that gin manufacturer Prue Winship dreams of erecting between Manhattan and Brooklyn at the dawn of the 19th century; however, it doesn’t so much depict a would-be architect’s invention as represent the fundamental need to invent in the first place. As it turns out, the willingness of its illustrator, Prue’s mute sister Pearl, to conform to Prue’s detailed specifications is finite; only too late does it become clear that Pearl has her own ideas about the way the world works, and an equally fierce capacity for expressing them. It’s not just that our creative urges define us; Brookland suggests that, even more than love, imagination makes or breaks us—or does both, even in the same moment. . . . Barton’s gift with Brookland, as with [The] Testament [of Yves Gundron], is to immerse you gradually in a part-historical, part-mythical world.”
—Ruth Tobias, the Weekly Dig

“The deliberate primness of Barton's tone -- common to both "Yves Gundron" and "Brookland," which are otherwise completely different books -- makes her a strange and rare object among contemporary American writers. In a world of speed and irony and obliqueness, her unhurried gait and formal diction catch the gaze and hold it. She thinks deeply about her subjects; her imagination has unusually wide bounds; the austerity of her voice at once offers and withholds revelation.”
—Lydia Millet, the Raleigh News & Observer

Read the original review: Raleigh News & Observer

“. . . a work of such grandeur that it evokes Tolstoy's genius for scope and story.”
—Julie Brickman, the San Diego Union-Tribune on Brookland

Read the original review: San Diego Union-Tribune

“Some young writers you just need to know about, if you care at all about fiction. Today's subject: Emily Barton. I'll wait while you jot that down. In 20 years, when it's perfectly obvious to everyone that Barton is one of the great ones of her generation, please take that slip out and remember where you read the name. . . . The result is a novel as transporting as "Yves Gundron," but all the more remarkably so for being virtually without any tricks of narrative. This time, Barton's delicately realistic prose soars alone, illuminating the shadows within a heart. . . .You can find out for yourself if Prue's wish is answered. Mine has been, now that Emily Barton's second novel has arrived to fulfill the promise of her first.”
—Marta Salij, the Detroit Free Press

“In Brookland, Emily Barton has taken an elegant way with questions of thought-provoking substance and has made a very fine and satisfying novel. And, if there is heartbreak at its end, those hearts are broken over things that mattered then — and still.”
—Tim Rutten, the Los Angeles Times

“Strip the saga from the family saga, and history-as-pageant treatment from the historical novel, and you end up roughly in the literary terrain that Emily Barton occupies in her heartfelt new novel, Brookland . . . For Barton, history is more than costuming and period color.”
—Art Winslow, the Chicago Tribune

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“Ms. Barton’s prose voice is as good and supple as anything being written in America today. But in its “period” tone (if that’s the word), it reaffirms the unswerving adage of the novel reader: Describe a world well enough and I am its member. This is the voice of a great novelist.”
—David Thomson, the New York Observer

Read the original review: The New York Observer

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We treasure and enjoy some novelists because they offer us a world, and let us feel we can enter it like original inhabitants. It’s a going home, even if we’ve never been there before. . . . I don’t necessarily mean to suggest that Emily Barton is a full-fledged rival to Thomas Hardy—but Ms. Barton is only in her 30’s, the age at which Hardy had written Far from the Madding Crowd and not much else. In fact, I suspect that Ms. Barton already has more voices in her head than Hardy possessed, as well as a sturdier hope for the lives we lead. But what makes Brookland such an enormous achievement, and such a complete world in which to escape, is that this place is not Wessex (now full of antiques and cream-tea nostalgia—a dead end), but that corner of the world where the East River snakes around the edge of Manhattan island, the opportunity that Brooklyners and Americans have to inspect New York and wonder what happens there. . . .This is a long story, and one that unwinds slowly, but with stunning enough effect to satisfy the waiting. The patience to stick with Prudence comes from the steady beauty of Ms. Barton’s writing. There are two strands to the book: letters written by Prudence as a mature woman (letters that capture both the eloquence and the idiosyncrasy of early 19th-century writing by unschooled people), and a more withdrawn narrative that is seldom modern or up-to-date. I take this backwards look—the bulk of the book—to be the largest part of Ms. Barton’s research (evidently extensive) and her talent (seemingly unlimited). And it may be worth stressing that many Hardy novels were set not in the year they were written but in a prior age, lost and enchanted. Ms. Barton’s prose voice is as good and supple as anything being written in America today. But in its “period” tone (if that’s the word), it reaffirms the unswerving adage of the novel reader: Describe a world well enough and I am its member. This is the voice of a great novelist.

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“Marvelous...So much modern fiction thinks small, feels small. Emily Barton will never be accused of either...Large and complex storytelling...Brookland turns out to be a story not just of risk, daring and ambition, but of the courage to fail--and the courage to live on after failing.”
—Christopher Corbett, New York Times Book Review

Read the original review: The New York Times Book Review

“But, if the bridge doesn’t succeed in creating the hoped-for unity, the book does. Brookland itself is a kind of bridge, not just in its great span, from 1772 to 1823, and in its lattice of solid little parts—what the Winships eat for dinner (sweet-potato stew), how many dresses Prue has (one, brown)—but in its balance of opposing forces, above all, the forces within Prue’s personality. Brookland is certainly a feminist novel, a child of Little Women and The Song of the Lark, but, unlike the protagonists of those books, Prue is not a “natural.” She isn’t pretty. She’s a worrywart; she’s full of envy and remorse. She loves her family passionately, but she would trade them all for the bridge. The thing she loves best is her own mind, but she doesn’t trust that, either. She is not a “good-models” feminist heroine, nor is she one of the bad-girl heroines of second-stage feminism. She is a thorny, struggling soul. Together with the book’s profound treatment of the spiritual ills born of the Enlightenment, this wonderful character is Barton’s main gift to us.”
—Joan Acocella, New Yorker Magazine

Read the original review: The New Yorker

“An engrossing folktale that, in our technology-crazed era, ought to be required reading.”
—John Freeman, Time Out New York

“Emily Barton's debut novel is destined to alter the landscape of contemporary literature.”
—Talk Magazine

“Fully and wittily imagined, written in heightened language that never falters of grows slack. . . . Barton’s language is beautiful and shapely and . . . lovely touches of magic add a wonderful texture. . . . A sly, joyous read.”
—Booklist

“A commanding and extraordinarily accomplished debut.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Rare is the author who can reimagine the fall of man and make it neither tragedy nor farce, but something delicately and illuminatingly balanced between. Rare, too, is the perspective Emily Barton takes for the audacious fable that is The Testament of Yves Gundron. She invokes a world that teeters before a likely ruinous progress and asks: What does it mean to be modern? Is it the acquisition of technology? The abandonment of the past? Or the ambivalence of embracing and repelling the future? Her answers might not be what you expect.”
—Marta Salij, the Chicago Tribune

“Few emerging novelists--or experienced ones--could handle the kinds of challenges Barton deftly accepts in this triumphant debut.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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“Blessedly post-ironic, engaging and heartfelt--a story that moves with ease and certainty, deeply respecting the given world even as it shines with the integrity of dream.”
—Thomas Pynchon on The Testament of Yves Gundron

Emily Barton

Reviews & Praise

About Emily Barton