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Very Cold People

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Very Cold People

Written by: Sarah Manguso
Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
Free with 30-day trial

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Buy Now for ₹323.00

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About this listen

Longlisted for the Wingate Prize
Financial Times Best Debuts
Guardian's Best Fiction of the Year

Once home to the country's most illustrious families, Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is now an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape, Ruthie learns how the town's prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history and how silence often masks a legacy of harm - from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends.

In Very Cold People Sarah Manguso reveals the suffocating constraints of growing up in a very old, and very cold, small town. Here lies a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smouldering rage . . .

‘I can’t think of a writer who is at once so formally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso' - Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man

 Genre Fiction Gothic Horror Literary Fiction Small Town & Rural Women's Fiction

Critic Reviews

A masterclass in unease
'My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway.’ So opens Manguso’s crystalline, mordant first novel about who belongs and who doesn’t in a declining Massachusetts town, as fortunes and status ebb and arrivistes displace the WASP gentry. Ruthie, the protagonist, has never felt at home in her hometown, and often wonders why; like other New England communities, Waitsfield hides its secrets well, until they erupt with a vengeance. Manguso puts her own indelible stamp on the literary terrain of John Cheever and Susan Minot, daring to brush against the third rail of class.
We applaud narrators who portray many people, but Lowman does the harder, subtler job of voicing the many moods of a single character. When Ruth is rueful, Lowman sounds it. Joyous. Same. When she’s disgusted, her tone and tempo match.
Magnificent . . . I hope all my fellow reader friends can find their way to this title either through their local library or independent bookseller. It is indeed special. (Sarah Jessica Parker via Instagram)
Sarah Manguso is one of the most original and exciting writers working in English today. Every word feels necessary, and she’s redefining genre as she goes (Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies)

With its adult narrator trying to recover the intuitions of her younger self, Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. Like Ferrante’s Lila and Lenu, Ruthie is sharply attuned to a force she doesn’t understand. Something is pushing through the cracks in the walls, the felted wool of her coat, but she lacks the context or language to name it . . . For Ruthie, the unseen current is some combination of class, whiteness, and the widespread sexual abuse of children.

(Katy Waldon)
Manguso is consistent in her approach and the cumulative effect is satisfying (Damon Galgut)
Very Cold People knocked me to my knees. So precise, so austere, so elegant, this story is devastatingly familiar to those of us who know the loneliness of growing up in a place of extreme emotional restraint. Manguso is one of my favourite writers, and this book is a revelation (Lauren Groff, author of Florida)

Midwesterners, New Englanders and anyone from small town America will recognize the contours in this quietly beautiful novel about what it feels like to grow up an outsider. It's a starkly lyrical exploration of the darkness that lies underneath a lily white community with an emotional resonance that sneaks up on you and won't let go.
I loved every sentence, thought, and gesture in this perfect novel. Sarah Manguso has painted a deeply moving portrait of the stark unreality of childhood (Catherine Lacey, author of Pew)
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