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Critical Praise

"Kasischke finds beauty amid the apocalypse in her timely seventh novel... Kasischke’s penchant for disconcerting but absorbing fiction is on display, as is her facility with language. Startling, sometimes violent images combine with strikingly dispassionate narration to create a fictional world where terror, beauty and chaos walk hand in hand."

Publishers Weekly

"Although Laura Kasischke’s novel is frighteningly timely with its backdrop of a pandemic flu, it is also touchingly timeless. From its haunting opening image to its riveting end, this is a tale of beauty, resilience, love, sacrifice, and even grace found in the most unlikely of places. In a truly ‘perfect world’ every book I read would inspire me like this one."

—Katrina Kittle, author of The Kindness of Strangers

"In a Perfect World reveals astonishing and tender insight into human nature while exposing a terrifying, yet believable, world I’d never before imagined. This story will grasp onto your heart before swiftly carrying you away... . If you were going to pitch this book for a movie you’d say something like, “A great Anne Tyler story meets a great Margaret Atwood story with a little bit of Ann Packer mixed in.” But, really, it’s even better than that: terrifying, brutally honest, and totally believable."

—Jessica Anya Blau, author of The Summer of Naked Swim Parties

"Kasischke could have... gone a hundred different ways: backwoods thriller, social satire, meditation on family, or pastoral love story. Instead, she craftily combines all these genres, creating a farcical, dark, resonant near-future world... . Lurking in the background is a chilling sense of foreboding straight out of Deliverance, swirling around a dysfunctional accidental-family dynamic that’s as familiar as it is flawed. Kasischke... writes with worldly-wise profundity and sudden beauty but also sly humor... Her brevity actually enhances the story’s propulsive quality. Reading In a Perfect World is like watching The Birds or another eerily vague tale of inchoate dread. We never really get answers, but we’re helplessly drawn in by a slew of burning questions, with this one foremost: When can we expect a sequel…or is that nothing but a doomed hope?"

Elle