The Five Wounds

An unputdownable novel, The Five Wounds takes my breath away with its intimate, humorous and heart-aching portrayal of a New Mexican family. Kirstin Valdez Quade can make a reader laugh and break a reader's heart in the same breath, and she leaves us, by the end of the novel, in awe of the dazzling power of her storytelling. -- Yiyun Li, author of Must I Go
The acclaimed author of Nights at the Fiestas returns with a gorgeously written, Franzen-caliber tale of one Latinx family's via dolorosa. * Oprah Magazine's Best Books of 2021 *
In this cruel and divisive era, Kirstin Valdez Quade has brought healing and regeneration with The Five Wounds. It is bracing and wise, and it breaks us in the best ways. Then builds back up again. It should find many grateful readers. -- Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Broken Angels
The characters in this engrossing novel are created in luminous and memorable detail. Just as the pacing is perfect, so too are the tact and care with which each scene is made. Kirstin Valdez Quade, by concentrating on the truth of small moments, has brought a whole world into focus. -- Colm Tóibín, author of House of Names
Kirstin Valdez Quade writes with exquisite precision about the fragility and resilience of the Amadeo family. Valdez Quade is attentive to both the trembling shadows and epic crescendos of her characters' shared and private lives. I loved The Five Wounds, which reminded me that growing pains are not confined to adolescence, and that people can be newborn at any age. Even its most excruciating moments are charged with a luminous, pitiless compassion. -- Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
The Five Wounds is brilliant! The story is bountiful and so incredibly well crafted-a beautiful braid of the life-cycle within a family. It captures both the strength and fragility of relationships and existence and the resilience and great power of love and belief. It is a novel about faith in the largest sense of the word. Each page is packed with detail and the most beautiful language-and images and characters that will remain part of our lives. -- A. M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven
I don't remember ever reading a novel as vibrant and warm as The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade. Just a few pages in, I felt like I intimately knew the characters, and cared about them as if they family members. It's both heartbreaking and a joy to read! -- Lara Vapnyar, author of Divide Me by Zero
With deep empathy, fierce intelligence, and subtle wit, Kirstin Valdez Quade has crafted an indelible portrait of a family living in precarity. The characters in The Five Wounds are so vivid, their struggles, failures, and grasping efforts towards love and redemption so finely wrought, and each page full of such immaculate prose, that I read this novel with ever-increasing breathless urgency. -- Phil Klay, author of Redeployment