Praise for Louisa Hall’s Reproduction
“The book’s triumph is to reveal, brilliantly and with feeling, the uncanny peculiarity of pregnancy and childbirth, and to connect this to all that is unnatural and peculiar about our overheating planet, with pollution and global warming throwing hormones awry and overheating pregnant bodies. It’s the tussle with Frankenstein that reveals how high the stakes are…this is life born of pain; life that may make us all into monsters of the kind Shelley incandescently brings into being. Hall’s achievement is to make these bleak revelations triumphantly on the side of life.”–The Guardian
“In Hall’s hands, Frankenstein evolves yet again…her ultimate insight is resonant: ‘we are all monsters, stitched together loosely, composed of remnants from other lives, pieces that often don’t seem as though they could plausibly belong to us.'”–The New Yorker
“Devastating and sharp…’Reproduction’ uses ‘Frankenstein’ as its foundation to conclude with a science fiction story of its own, but what is more powerful about the book is how it captures the life-changing experience of pregnancy and birth.”–The Los Angeles Times
“Dreamy and despairing…an uncomfortably lovely nightmare.”–The Washington Post
“Hall’s prose is taut, each word impactful, each short chapter a meditation on what could be…a series of what-ifs, surprises, and moments of wonder.”–Bookpage, Starred Review
“A visceral, chimerical genre-bender”–Vanity Fair
“This book would be valuable if only for Hall’s phantasmagorical depiction of childbirth and her honesty about how lonely mothering can be. But Hall also situates her story in a world in which gene-editing technology and climate change and global pandemics are real. Like Shelley herself, Hall provides readers a text composed of diverse parts, a text that readers can endlessly take apart and stitch back together to create new ideas. Body horror and philosophy commingle in this strange, enthralling novel.”–Kirkus, Starred Review
“Graceful, precise, and perceptive, this is a memorable take on the danger and strangeness of pregnancy.”–Publishers Weekly
“What a brilliant novel! I was moved, troubled, enchanted; hardly able to breathe as I read. Hall’s dazzling and original tale has the force of myth, embodying the monstrous challenges of reproducing in our strange new world.”–Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and Natural History
“I read this novel in a single rapturous sitting, torn between the desire to hurtle through its hypnotic prose and the desire to reread every perfect sentence. Reproduction exquisitely captures the lunacy of inhabiting an animal body with a human mind, and somehow manages also to be gross, funny, heartrending, and formally acrobatic. Louisa Hall is a singular talent and I am a devotee.”–Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood and Body Work
“A brave and dynamic novel about the creation of life and art–narratively free, compulsively readable, and true-to-life.”–Tao Lin, author of Leave Society and Taipei
“It’s taken me seven years of reading, and about a thousand more books, to be able to say once again: ‘This is the best book I’ve ever read.’ For one thing Louisa Hall has written what is by far the best depiction of childbirth I’ve ever seen. She has perfectly captured the hollow void of grief after the miscarriage of a wanted child. She has reminded me of the sometime-strangeness of living inside a woman’s body when it refuses to get pregnant when you want it to, or gets pregnant when you don’t want it to. I’ve also had the privilege of spending time with a deeply feeling, deeply observant narrator, and she has gifted me with a wise and revelatory view of these times. When I read this book again in ten years I’ll surely be saying to myself: ‘yes, that is exactly how it was.’ It’s a marvelous gift of a book.” –Claire Oshetsky, author of Chouette
“Witty, wrenching, and relentlessly smart as a novel of motherhood, Reproduction is also a brilliantly patterned meditation on genre. Exploring the body horror of female embodiment in America; the time travel inherent in childbirth; the genetic engineering of everyday life; and the long apocalypses of climate change, the novel reminds us that all realist fiction is science fiction now, and that every autobiographical novel is in part (and in parts) a Frankenstein novel. In fashioning a Frankenstein novel of her own, about all the mad sciences of reproduction, Louisa Hall raises profound questions about what it means to make a creature, and to be one.” –Bennett Sims, author of White Dialogues and A Questionable Shape
“Compelling,elegant, and bitingly smart, Reproduction left me reeling. It is playful and serious, witty and searing, inventive and heart-rending. I utterly loved it.”–Nell Stevens, author of Briefly, A Delicious Life
Praise for Louisa Hall’s Trinity
“Brilliant…Hall has shaped a richly imagined, tremendously moving fictional work. Its genius is not to explain but to embody the science and politics that shaped Oppenheimer’s life…the resulting quantum portrait feels both true and dazzlingly unfamiliar.”–The New York Times
“Brilliant…Trinity sounds a wake-up call to those who have failed to ease the threat of planetary destruction through a slowness to effect controls on fossil fuels, other environmental dangers and, indeed, nuclear weapons. If they took action, the world would change. Oppenheimer changed course in his own life–and though Hall’s imagined reading of his mind, she shows us that we still can too.”–Time Magazine
“Staggeringly beautiful…Trinity is a masterpiece.”–BookPage
“Triumphant…powerful…with beautiful specificity and nuance, Hall interrogates such major issues as ethics in scientific discovery and breaching the chasm between public and private selves.”–Vanity Fair
“Startling…quietly devastating…a dizzying, kaleidoscopic marvel of a book, and a beautiful reflection on the impossibility of creating a truly accurate narrative of any person’s life.”–The Texas Observer
“Brilliantly imaginative…nuanced…an imaginary world bursting with secrets, dilemmas, betrayals, and lives wrestling with ideals.”–National Book Review
“Elegant and true.”–The Washington Post
“A brilliant canvas revealing life’s complexities and the enigmatic character who inspired the narrative.”–Library Journal, starred review
“Arresting…history, Hall insists, happens on the human scale and the narratives in which we find ourselves caught up often blind us to larger truths…an intelligent, serious novel.”–The Daily Mail
“A splintered and intriguing portrait of this brilliant and conflicted man…Hall’s explosive fragmentation of Oppenheimer’s life makes for an original book, a novel of the unseen, and finally, the unknowable.”–The Financial Times
“A very clever novel, both intimate and enormous in scope, as it explores how a man who created one of the most terrifying weapons in history can continue to move through a world he changed forever.”–Science Fiction Now
“Ambitiously takes on far-reaching issues at Los Alamos in a passionate, personal way.”–Pasatiempo
“An insightful tale about the rise and fall of a very complex individual whose life’s work caused immense tragedy.”–Ezvid Wiki
“Ingeniously structured…Hall (Speak) excels at creating distinct characters whose voices illuminate their own lives and challenges, as well as the historical period that saw Oppenheimer’s fall from grace. Taken together, they only burnish the endlessly fascinating enigma of the flawed genius who became known as the father of the atom bomb.”–Publisher’s Weekly
“Boldly imagined…vivid…lushly written, this is an ambitious, unsettling novel that takes on big issues in a passionate, personal way.”–Kirkus Reviews
“With war, McCarthyism, and nuclear proliferation as a backdrop, Hall’s observers paint a picture of not just one man but of humanity. What are the secrets we keep? What price will we pay to keep them? Can anyone truly know another human being? Each narrator has a unique and convincing voice in this compelling novel centered on the man who saw himself as ‘Death, the destroyer of worlds.'”–Booklist
Praise for Louisa Hall’s Speak
“Speak is one of a kind, the type of novel that seemingly comes out of nowhere and hits like a thunderbolt. It’s not just one of the smartest books of the year, it’s one of the most beautiful ones, and it almost seems like an understatement to call it a masterpiece”–National Public Radio
“Crystalline, utterly persuasive and transfixing…the freshness — the brilliance, even — of Speak lies in its positioning of robots not as terrifyingly new, but as the latest in a long line of ‘magic mirrors’ from which we are powerless to look away.”–The New York Times Book Review
“Quietly sublime…Hall’s prose is as close to flawless as one can hope for in a fallen world.”–The Chicago Tribune
“Strange, beautiful and unputdownable.” —The New York Post
“Intelligent and absorbing…Speak is a hypnotic read.”–The Guardian
“Stunning…Comparisons to Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, and Helen Phillips will abound, but the remarkable Speak is a unique creation that stands on its own.” —Bustle
“Audacious…wry and poignant.”–The Washington Post
“Hall is a poet, and Speak is very much a poet’s novel, full of exquisitely written visual description. There is a Nabokovian vividness to many of the observations… Hall repeatedly and cannily turns her sentences to look backwards, because her book is profoundly about how the past makes the present, how memories and stories constitute our souls.”–The Guardian
Like (Mary) Shelley, (Louisa Hall) has created what might be described as a “philosophical romance” which ultimately reveals that the real monster resides within ourselves, not within our science.–The Roanoke Times
“Complex, haunting, and a little too real.”–The Rumpus
“Speak is a poignant reminder that language has mystery, and that questions of authenticity will always be with us.” –The Tampa Bay Times
“A compulsively readable tale.”–The Austin American Statesman
“Speak is a novel of uncanny breadth and ambition.”–Fiction Advocate
“Call it the influence of David Mitchell or Hari Kunzru, but Speak is a kaleidoscope of a book… it is a novel that wants to raise big questions about how we know one another and ourselves.” –Los Angeles Times
“Speak gazes boldly forward and lovingly back in order to report on the nature of what it means to be human now.” —Elle Magazine
“A mesmerizing examination of the tenuous divide between man and machine”–The Bozeman Daily Chronicle
“For fans of David Mitchell and Margaret Atwood…this is an audacious, thoughtful, brilliant novel.”–The Sound
“The novel’s conceit might appeal to fans of David Mitchell, though Ms. Hall is mostly interested in plumbing the sensitive depths of her characters rather than tightening the screws of a mind-blowing schematic.”–The New York Times
“Fascinating…a book that achieves a tough combination: its frightening and highly scientific, yet also poignant.”–Bookpage
“Hall’s empathy suffuses each character’s voice, and the letters from Turing are especially touching.”–New York One
“(Speak) has already drawn obvious comparisons to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. But Hall’s voices, which constitute a fragmented alternate history of artificial intelligence, are more earthbound than Mitchell’s. In journal entries, unanswered letters, and the occasional computer testimonial, explorers of all kinds are overheard speaking into the void, ruminating on lost memories, missed connections, and the fatal flaws of men and their machines.”–New York Magazine
“Expansive, thoughtful…much like the big question mark hanging over the possibilities of AI, Hall’s story tends to raise questions without definitive answers. “Speak” leaves its conclusions to its readers, to flip back and forth among the characters’ differing points of view and decide for themselves — and is all the more engaging for it.”–The Salt Lake Tribune
“A sensitive, beautiful, and timely novel.” —Amazon Best Books of July 2015
“To go from the voice of [a] daunted, yet empathetic young puritan girl to a the voice of a heart-broken, over-worked Jewish refugee and computer science professor in the ‘60s is close to acrobatic for an author to pull off, in terms of switching the rhythms and energies of her narrative voice… Hall’s words on these pages made it seem effortless.” —Paste Magazine
“[A] remarkably fresh new novel about artificial intelligence… so new, so unusual, and so necessary…its focus on the relationships between humans and the computers they talk to feels entirely original.” –Barnes & Noble / Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog
“Hall subtly weaves a thread through a temporally diverse cast of narrators. Like all good robot novels, Speak raises questions about what it means to be human as well as the meaning of giving voice to memory.” —Booklist, Starred Review
“Delicately crafted, fragile, and infinitely beautiful, uncovering humanity’s most elusive and abstract thoughts.” —ABA Indie Next List
“Hall capably weaves the stories to form a beautiful rumination on the nature of memory and the frailty of human relationships.”–Library Journal, Starred Review
“Speak is that rarest of finds: a novel that doesn’t remind me of any other book I’ve ever read. A complex, nuanced, and beautifully written meditation on language, immortality, the nature of memory, the ethical problems of artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human.”–Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
“Everything you could want in a story is here: courage and cowardice, lust and devotion, sickness and health, partings and death, better and worse. Speak is a novel that calls to the reader in many voices, harnessed to one distinct and singular imagination: Louisa Hall’s. Turn to page one and be amazed.”–Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman
“Louisa Hall’s Speak is a deeply original and intelligent novel. It’s also riveting. I wouldn’t have thought artificial intelligence, as a subject, would make for such a warm and human and psychologically astute novel. I’ll be thinking about Babybots and Hall’s quietly chilling and all-too-plausible vision of the near-future for a long time to come.” –Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
“Speak is a triumph. With a poet’s voice, Louisa Hall reaches into the past and imagines the future to weave a beautifully complex novel about our human need to communicate. The result is a transcendent story about artificial intelligence that heartbreaking and very, very real.”––Ivy Pochoda, author of Visitation Street
Praise for Louisa Hall’s The Carriage House
“A chronicler of American suburban sadness to rival the likes of John Cheever and Richard Yates.” ––Tom Cox, Sunday Express
“[A] marvelously mature debut…Hall displays a Whartonian malice…[and] seamlessly transitions among the many individual points of view…The novel’s technical proficiency and its gratifyingly nuanced ending make it easy to recommend.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“A twisted family saga lodged in John Cheever and Wes Anderson.”—Rebecca Bengal, Vogue
“A splendid, carefully plotted, open-hearted novel”–James Zug, The Boston Globe
“The Carriage House is gorgeously detailed and rife with betrayal, heartbreak, nostalgia, lost love, and possibilities for redemption. You will ache for the Adair family, cringe at their mistakes, and plead with them to make peace with each other before it’s too late. In her smart and insightful debut, Louisa Hall examines the ways in which we fail and forgive others–and ourselves.” –Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise
“Graceful prose…the themes of memory and nostalgia threading through the novel are especially resonant.”—Abigail Meisel, The New York Times Book Review
“The Carriage House is full of compelling personal portraits–characters who’ll stay with you long after you put the book down.”—Charles Ealey, Austin American Statesman
“Through superb character development, narrative innovations that are all her own, and humor that winks at Austen…Hall crafts a poignant tale.”—Emma Adler, The Harvard Crimson
“Kind-hearted and subtle–a tribute to Jane Austen’s Persuasion.”—Vanora Bennett, The Times
“In this engaging debut, Hall renders an intriguing cast of characters striving to find hope in the midst of despair.” —Allison Block, Booklist
“Fluid, intelligent prose…a grand drama of clashing personalities.”—Michael Leonard, Curled Up with a Good Book