Critical Praise

"Shapiro has both a best-selling writer's instinct for plot and pacing and a fine literary sensibility . . . a powerful, penetrating illumination of the hidden agendas and consequences of family relationships."

——Lisa Shea, Elle

"Absorbing . . . elegantly written, wry and unsettling."

——Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

"One of those books most readers will finish in one sitting . . . because it is so intense you can't take a break. In gripping, moving prose, Shapiro reminds us of any family's essential fragility, but also of the tenacious strength of love."

——Linnea Lannon, Detroit Free Press

"Riveting."

——Harper's Bazaar

"Dani Shapiro has the gift. That a book as harrowing as Family History can be such a pageturner is testimony to the primal power of storytelling and the saving grace of art."

——David Gates

"Few novels demonstrate the worth of and need for family in the way that this one does. None have made me more aware of its ongoing fragility. To read Family History is to understand in the most visceral of ways that nothing in our closest relationships can ever be taken for granted. And though that realization might make you uncomfortable, it will also make you deeply grateful for the blessings that you enjoy."

——Elizabeth Berg

"Dani Shapiro has written powerfully and lovingly about that most complicated, interesting, and dangerous of subjects, the family."

——Roxanna Robinson

"A bona fide page turner . . . a poised, absorbing book . . . Shapiro describes the cold new world Rachel and her husband inhabit in graceful and nuanced prose."

——Emily White, New York Times

"From the first page to the last, Family History is virtually impossible to put down: a beautifully structured, tightly woven exploration of the mysteries of adolescent pain, and the brutal efficiency with which a crisis can engulf a family and transform it into something unrecognizable."

——Jennifer Egan

"No family is ever entirely fathomed, even by itself–the map must be drawn new each time. In Family History, Dani Shapiro trains her abundant gifts as a writer on one family struggling at the brink of dissolution, and the map she so powerfully draws is heartbreaking, and impossible to turn away from."

——John Burnham Schwartz