The Book of Joan (eBook)

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children (winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Awards' Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and the Readers' Choice Award) and Dora: A Headcase. Her highly acclaimed memoir, The Chronology of Water, was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for Creative Non-fiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Awards' Readers' Choice. Her TED talk, 'The Beauty of Being a Misfit', has been watched over two million times. Lidia teaches in Oregon, where she lives with her husband Andy Mingo and their son. She is a very good swimmer. @LidiaYuknavitch | lidiayuknavitch.net

Brilliant and incendiary, mixing realism and fabulism

Now is a fine time for tales of women's resistance, which, above all else, is what The Book of Joan has on offer . . . This world's Joan is scarred and strong, a fully adult Katniss Everdeen with bigger guns

All my youth I gloried in the wild, exulting, rollercoaster prose and questing narratives of Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac, but cringed at the misogyny; couldn't we have the former without the latter? We can, because: Lidia Yuknavitch. Buckle your seat belts; it's gonna be a wild feminist ride

The Book of Joan has the same unflinching quality as earlier works by Josephine Saxton, Doris Lessing, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin and J.G. Ballard. Yet it's also radically new, full of maniacal invention and page-turning momentum . . . A rich, heady concoction, rippling with provocative ideas

The Book of Joan is something new altogether . . . Kaleidoscopic, lyric . . . The Book of Joan shows off Yuknavitch's imagination and her gift for crafting sonorous sentences

A raucous celebration, a searing condemnation, and fiercely imaginative retelling of Joan of Arc's transcendent life

It's unfair to compare Yuknavitch to only female authors. With her verve and bold imagination, she's earned the throne left empty since the death of David Foster Wallace

While delivering an entirely new world and also putting forth a powerful treatise on the way we live now, The Book of Joan is one of those dystopian novels that you can't help thinking might be too eerily real to be just fiction

Riveting, ravishing, and crazy deep . . . As ferociously intelligent as it is heart-wrenchingly humane, as generous as it is relentless, as irresistible as it is important . . . genius

Radical, raw, and inventive