Tumbledown

"A winning ensemble cast of therapists and patients make stabs at sanity in Robert Boswell's mordantly funny novel Tumbledown." --Vanity Fair

"A complicated, nuanced look at human experience and the insights into that experience contributed by people of varying kinds of intelligence." --The Washington Post



"A moving and often darkly hilarious meditation on sanity." --Houston Chronicle



"A deft twining of irony and insight on nearly every page . . . Tumbledown wryly mines the heartache in emotional disturbances, some present from birth and the rest brought on by the business of living." --The New York Times



"Within a suspenseful plot spiked with love triangles and flashbacks, Boswell renders each complex psyche and scene with magnificent precision and penetrating vision, fine-tuning our definitions of disorder and healing and deepening our perception of what it is to be normal, what it is to be human." --Booklist (starred review)

"Like a funnier One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, this story focuses on a therapist and his wild yet well-meaning patients, bumbling through life, trying to make sense of the world and one another." --O, The Oprah Magazine, Ten Titles to Pick Up Now

"Boswell can write the most refreshingly old-fashioned kind of narrative: one that evokes deep sympathy for all its characters . . . All the novel's characters know that in adulthood they're supposed to settle for 'what could pass for a normal life. Maybe it was a C- sort of life, but that was a passing grade.' Still, they want to keep hope, wonder and love in their lives . . . Without a whiff of sentimentality, he shows exactly how elusive such balance can be." --The New York Times Book Review