Publishers Weekly
04/29/2024
Wroblewski delivers a gratifying if overstuffed prequel to his 2008 bestseller, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. In May 1919, 22-year-old Wisconsin automotive worker John Sawtelle witnesses his boss’s murder and heads north with his wife, Mary, and their friends Ulysses Elbow and Frank Eckling out of fear he’ll be falsely implicated in the crime. After the four settle on a dilapidated farm, John works as a dog breeder, raises two sons, Edgar and Claude, and encounters some unsettling surprises in the woods surrounding the property. One plot thread features a neighbor with supernatural abilities—she ages at half the normal human rate and can see into a person’s future. Another involves a violent and tragic episode, which results in the Sawtelles and their friends going their separate ways. The author tends to lose his way in lengthy sections of backstory and drawn-out conversation pieces as the plot slowly approaches the events of the first novel. Still, there are beautiful passages on the bonds between humans and animals and plenty of folksy charm. Fans of the first book will be satisfied. Agent: Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (June)
New York Times bestselling author of The Road from Margot Livesey
Like many readers, I adored The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, with its gripping tale of treachery and the magnificent Sawtelle dogs. Now I adore Familiaris. David Wroblewski is a wonderfully inventive writer; he knows so much—how to test a tractor, how to make a table, how to borrow money, how to see the future—but best of all he is a writer of extraordinary characters, human and canine, who will take up residence in your mind and heart. A dazzling and irresistible novel.”
Tom Hanks
By taking us back to the origins of the Sawtelle family, Wroblewski has set a storytelling bonfire as enthralling in its pages as it is illuminating of our fragile and complicated humanity. Familiaris is as expansive and enlightening a saga as has ever been written.”
PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of Secrets Joan Silber
No writer understands the depths of dogs’ natures the way David Wroblewski does, and once again we have a vital, absorbing, and remarkable fiction fueled by this understanding. Familiaris is a rare novel, modest and epic.”
National Book Award winner and author of Apeirogon Colum McCann
Tender, ambitious, fierce, deeply human, and of course wonderfully canine, David Wroblewski’s second novel is an American tour de force. There were moments when reading that I thought of Russo, Irving, Strout, McCarthy, Gilbert, and then just Wroblewski himself. A story spun out over generations, to be read for generations, this is a big brave book that is old fashioned in the very best sense of the word."
Richard Russo
‘Suppose you could do one impossible thing,’ John Sawtelle says in David Wroblewski’s stunning new novel Familiaris. What would you do? Clearly, what the author would do and has done is write this impossibly wise, impossibly ambitious, impossibly beautiful book.”
Ron Rash
David Wroblewski is one of the few contemporary authors who can create a world that the reader doesn’t merely visit but fully inhabits. And what a world it is, rich with love and joy and heartbreak. And wonder, especially in the way human and canine form inseparable bonds. It has been a long wait for a new Wroblewski novel. The wait is worth it.”
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Spellbinding…This warm, big-hearted novel pays tribute to the joys of curiosity and creation and turns out to be surprisingly funny, even as storm clouds gather on the family’s horizon.”
Newsday
If you’ve read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, you know that no one writes about dogs with more insight than Wroblewski…This great American novel bustles with life, and if it takes all summer to read it, who cares.”
author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin Colum McCann
Tender, ambitious, fierce, deeply human, and of course wonderfully canine, David Wroblewski’s second novel is an American tour de force. There were moments when reading that I thought of Russo, Irving, Strout, McCarthy, Gilbert, and then just Wroblewski himself. A story spun out over generations, to be read for generations, this is a big brave book that is old fashioned in the very best sense of the word."
Library Journal
★ 06/28/2024
With this new novel, the origin story behind his bestselling The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Wroblewski transports readers to the wilds of Wisconsin's Northwoods in 1919, where John Sawtelle is in search of something grand. This impressive novel (in both content and heft) brings readers deep into John's mind and heart as he strives to put together the life and family he envisions. He and his new bride Mary, along with best friends and beloved dogs, set out to create a purposeful life on a plot of land. Each person brings talents to bear on their joint project, as do the amazing Sawtelle dogs John and Mary rescue, breed, raise, and train. Seeking depth of understanding of dogs, humans, and the natural world around them brings John and Mary into contact with all manner of events, natural and otherwise. VERDICT Wroblewski's talent dances on the page in a searingly gorgeous novel written with piercing, insightful language. Readers of David James Duncan, John Irving, and George Saunders will fall in love. Seriously recommended for all readers whose hearts were first broken by Wilson Rawls's Where the Red Fern Grows. Don't be daunted by the length; by the end of this book, readers will wish for even more.—Julie Kane
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-02-03
A great American novel of people and passions and ideas—and, of course, dogs.
For the many fans of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (2008), this ambitious and captivating prequel focuses on that character’s grandfather, John Sawtelle. Its nearly 1,200 pages begin in 1919 when John, who has been working as a road-tester at a car factory, finds a perfect piece of land when his jalopy breaks down in middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin, where he surprises his dog, Gus, by walking 63 yards on his hands. John won’t take possession of this inspiring tract for another 300-some pages, necessary to introduce the key characters and elements Wroblewski has invented to populate his cabinet of wonders. Characters include a giant carpenter named Elbow; a World War I amputee named Frank Eckling; John’s brilliant and sensitive soulmate, Mary; a logger named So Jack Von Osten and his huge horse, Granddaddy, who can both count and give romantic counseling. Elements: none more important than a fictional 1897 volume called Practical Agriculture and Free Will by George Solomon Drencher, the source of John’s conviction that life’s purpose is to “Seek, seek, seek—the Singularism!” John’s singularism is of course encapsulated in the breed of dog he and Mary will eventually develop, the Sawtelle dog; you’ll wait another few hundred pages for that to emerge, but the delights along the way are manifold. Like this comparison of whiskey and brandy: “Whiskey tasted like something squeezed out of an oak plank, like mentholated gasoline. Brandy was composed of equal parts sunlight and lava. Where whiskey came home looking for an argument, brandy noticed how truly simpatico you were.” One of the darker parts of the book focuses on a terrible incident involving John and Mary’s sons, setting the stage for events readers of Edgar will recall with a chill. A hilarious and moving section toward the end—by now it’s the late 1950s—follows John’s attempts to write a book called Familiaris, in which the author may or may not reveal secrets of his craft. Already having drawn comparisons to Russo, Irving, Strout, McCarthy, and Gilbert, with García Márquez added here, Wroblewski earns them all, amply rewarding readers who have been waiting impatiently for 15 years.
For all the eons it may take to read it, this colossus of a book will own you.