The Mare

Gaitskill's work feels more real than real life and reading her leads to a place that feels like a sacred space. * Boston Globe *
Penetrating ... confronts, head-on, white privilege and black victimhood. * Daily Mail *
Gaitskill's novel is not a children's book, but it is a book about what children long for, and how we long for the same thing many years after we've left childhood behind * The New York Times *
Velvet is that most wonderful of fictional creations: a convincing child who manages to be a captivating and perceptive narrator. * New Yorker *
Visceral and haunting, and the telling, with its shifting first person narrative, is nothing short of masterful. * GQ *
A poignant, beautiful coming of age story about race, class and motherhood. * Women and Home *
A thoroughly compelling read ... redemptive and moving, The Mare offers as much fresh air for the author (and the reader) as it does for her characters. * Spectator *
A timely examination of the pains and pleasures that follow one woman's attempt to bridge the yawning gap of understanding between two races. * Sunday Express *
Emotionally complex voices crafted with skill and sensitivity. * Mail on Sunday *
Her voice captures a child's mixture of insight and innocence ... As a model for getting back in contact with the natural world, this is a delirious dream. As an acknowledgment of what human beings fail to offer each other, it comes closer to being a nightmare. * Times *
A novel about race, class and, as Gaitskill's convincingly drawn characters show how different worlds collide, the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the two in America. * Daily Express *
The Mare is a dark, dreamlike novel, at times nightmarish, at others offering glimpses of the sublime, shocking in its raw depiction of violence, and beautiful in its evocation of flawed love. * Financial Times *
a devastatingly good novel * psychologies magazine *
Here, without a drop of condescension, is fiction that pumps blood through the cold facts of inequality * Washington Post *
The range of Gaitskill's humanity is astonishing and matched only, it seems, by a desire to confront readers with the trembling reality of our shared ugliness * LA Times *