In Bowlaway, death and love and dreams live together, squabbling, soothing, holding hands, full of resentment, affection and confusion, like members of a large, spirited, extended family. But McCracken’s ironic perspective, her humor and her deeply humane imagination never desert her.

is jumpier, twitchier, a big book that veers in and out of the lives of its idiosyncratic characters, creating what McCracken calls a 'genealogy,' occasionally verging, in its bric-a-brac of historical oddball detail, on the precious.

McCracken refuses to distinguish between the absurdity of comedy and the absurdity of tragedy. Humor illuminates her work, revealing things clearly that we might have overlooked. At the turn of the twentieth century, enigmatic Bertha Truitt appears in the town of Salford, MA, lying unconscious in a cemetery. It’s been more than 17 years since Elizabeth McCrackenIowa Writers’ Workshop alum and acclaimed writer of fiction as well as a beautiful, heartrending memoirpublished a novel. Her first novel since 2002, Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway is an epic generational story that doesn’t feel epic at all instead, reading it is familiar, funny, alive. Elizabeth McCracken’s first novel in 18 years, Bowlaway, is that most improbable of literary phenomena: a buoyant, joyful, rollicking yarn of sadness and loss. McCracken and Carey may be unassuming, but their work is unassailable. Always, though, shining through the carefully, beautifully painted grays, is the clarity of McCracken’s humor, bright and invigorating, like flickers of sunlight. Their recent novels are simply outstanding. Like a pinbody, Elizabeth McCracken steadies her constellation of characters, and readers watch as fate rolls their way, knocking them sideways, sending them flying into the gutters or skimming past them, missing them altogether.

Bowlaway elizabeth mccracken