This Strange Eventful History

Reviews / Votes

This epic family saga, which stretches from Algeria in 1927 to Connecticut in 2010 . . . [is a] wise and insightful novel about identity and family, and how love can stifle as well as comfort * The Times, Book of the Day * An epic family odyssey . . . Ambitious and compelling . . . What gives this novel its exceptional vitality is that Messud never allows collective issues to take precedence over individual lives . . . Not only do they live - thanks to the novel's bold reach and multiple viewpoints, they change . . . Slowly, and only ever partially, we are allowed to glimpse the traumas and tensions and the intensely private joys that have shaped these people's existences . . . This is a big novel spanning continents and generations, but it also has the essential small virtues of precision and imaginative sympathy * Guardian Book of the Day * A rich, sprawling saga . . . This Strange Eventful History may be Messud's finest book * Sunday Telegraph * This continent-hopping, multigenerational saga certainly lives up to its title . . . Evocative and richly characterised * Financial Times, Best Summer Books of 2024 * A novel of how families are scattered across borders by the uncontrollable forces of history . . . a fascinating and wise work. It is about a family, but it is also about the inexorable sands of time which slip through our fingers from one minute to the next * Sunday Independent * In her fiction Ms Messud has excelled at exploring human connections in all their complexity... This Strange Eventful History examines family ties on a grand scale... Though the book is ambitious in its scope, it is also intimate, probing characters' secrets and lies, tarnished dreams and missed opportunities... this is a masterful novel about people who are "buffeted by history" - but also shaped by it * Economist * Magnificent and multi-layered, hearty and heartbreaking . . . a generation-spanning, continent-hopping family saga * Financial Times * Wonderfully enjoyable, intelligent, perceptive, moving . . . written with such affection and understanding, such an awareness of the passing of time and of the unavoidably bruising nature of experience which is nevertheless redeemed by love, loyalty, and kindness . . . It is indeed rare to come upon a novel which offers such a cornucopia of pleasure, such a sense of the physical world and the reality of experience * Scotsman * Claire Messud has transformed three generations of her family's story into a tour de force inThis Strange Eventful History . . . all around them are the upheavals of the 20th century, but though Messud is working on a grand canvas, her skill is in miniature. History is dazzling in its fine-tuned character studies . . . all beautifully realized. This is a pointillist novel, profound in its portrayal of strains, bonds, and heartbreak * Vogue * 'Expect to be awed by profound empathy coupled with razor-sharp prose * Mail on Sunday * Almost unbearably moving, wise and full of the most gorgeous prose -- Alex Preston * Observer Novels to Look Out For in 2024 * A story that is fragmentary yet fluid, her own but also ours * Spectator * Deeply intertwined with the sociopolitical upheaval of the twentieth century, and inspired by the author's own family history, this sweeping narrative is as intimate as it is profound. All of Messud's work is masterful, but this novel is her masterpiece * Oprah Daily * An epic cross-generational story that follows a pieds-noirs family separated in the chaos of World War II and made adrift without a homeland after Algerian independence. The novel's ingenuity and ambitious scope can't be underestimated; This Strange Eventful History is nothing less than a literary event, sure to surprise and delight at every turn * Chicago Review of Books * An epic exploration of a family's long and often tortured history. Though the novel is both sweeping and intimate, spanning seven decades and six continents, from World War II through the aughts, Messud's piercing interiority keeps the focus tight, gaining the reader access to her characters' innermost thoughts. Her attention to detail, memory, and foreshadowing suggest the influence of Tolstoy and Proust * Boston Globe * Messud's expansive novel is a family chronicle set between 1940 and 2010 that doubles as an album of itinerancy, tracking the Cassars' restless journeys across six continents and illuminating the rootlessness that gripped the generation raised in the aftermath of World War II . . . Messud's patiently detailed personality studies acquire emotional force, particularly as cracks begin to show in the Cassar mythology . . . [This Strange Eventful History] skillfully build[s] to a low but steady boil while delivering quiet, elliptical moments that nevertheless linger in the mind * Wall Street Journal * Profound and exacting... an epic involving several generations of a diasporic family on a volatile earth * Literary Review * The big questions are here, about family and colonialism and grief. But the real promise of a 425-page family epic is that it will provide an emotional punch, too. On that, it delivers.... it's hard not to be hypnotized * Vulture.com * In a major new novel from the author of The Woman Upstairs, a family is dispersed across the globe in the wake of the second world war * Guardian 'Books to Look Out For in 2024' * A tour de force, This Strange Eventful History is one of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters. Call it the War and Peace of the 20th and 21st century, call it The Long View of a family migrating through many borders, worlds, and eras, call it anything and we fall short. Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller, and the novel, an all-encompassing history of many human hearts and any human heart, will linger and haunt us as the best and the most heartbreaking memory -- Yiyun Li This Strange Eventful History is a deep and beautiful slow burn, encompassing a sweep of history and acutely observed family dynamics. Claire Messud is without doubt one of the most talented novelists of her generation -- Joanna Briscoe An engrossing tale with dizzying sweep, and beautifully written -- Lionel Shriver Inspired by acclaimed author Claire Messud's own ancestry, This Strange Eventful History chronicles seven decades in the lives of a fictional family of Algerian-born French citizens. Opening with the patriarch, naval attache Gaston, while he is stationed in Greece as Paris falls to the Nazis, the novel unfolds as war, distance, politics, and faith test the family's ties. Messud follows the Cassars from 1940 to 2010, weaving a complex, multi-generational saga against the backdrop of World War II, the Algerian Revolution, and beyond * The 25 Most Anticipated Books of 2024, Time magazine * Messud's gimlet eye and quietly masterful way with words make every character and incident gripping . . . Brilliant and heart-wrenching; Messud is one of contemporary literature's best * Starred Kirkus review * [Messud] draws from her own family history for this exquisite multigenerational saga of the Cassars, a pied-noir clan exiled from Algeria by the country's 1954-62 war of independence... In her characteristically artful prose, Messud burrows inside the hearts and minds of her key players, bringing to their struggles and self-deceptions a deep-veined empathy made even more remarkable by how close she is to the story. This is an astonishment * Publishers Weekly (starred review) * A novelist of exquisite artistry and insight draws on her own family history in this gorgeously realized, acutely sensitive, cosmopolitan, century-spanning, multigenerational saga . . . Messud captures life's wheels-within-wheels on every incandescent page * Booklist (starred review) * This Strange Eventful History is the powerful saga of a family buffeted by eternal conflicts: war, exile, thwarted ambitions, forbidden sexual desires. Messud tells the story of the Cassars, a French colonial family expelled from their beloved Algeria and scattered across Europe, North America, Australia, and how each generation of survivors relives the familial trauma of dispossession. Messud's mesmerizing tale of true love, duty, faith, and family secrets is a must-read! -- Fernanda Eberstadt, author of BITE YOUR FRIENDS What an extraordinary experience This Strange Eventful History gives to readers. It takes them on artful and masterfully orchestrated grand tours - of the world as it spins toward and away from World War II into nearly our own time, of three generations of the Cassar family as it concentrates and disperses and arrays itself across the spinning world, of the individual family members as they each experience in their own indelible ways how history enfolds and excludes us, how time - implacable and indecipherable - befalls us, and how love may possibly be the only true human masterpiece, elusive as it so often and tragically proves to be. Claire Messud captures the heartbreaking paradoxes of being in our world and in ourselves yet feeling separated from both with a precision and acuity like no other writer I know -- Paul Harding, author of the Booker shortlisted THIS OTHER EDEN This Strange Eventful History is an astonishment - rich and luminous, dense with life, wide with wisdom. Messud's view of the Cassar family - and we suspect as we read it, her own - is as emotionally precise and imaginatively capacious as her rendering of the history that shapes their fortunes. Rarely has the private magic of familial love been so fully realized in a public act of literature. Just exquisite -- Ayad Akhtar A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud's epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become "colonized" by family -- Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winner of THE NETANYAHU'S There are few genres more enjoyable than the sprawling, decade-spanning family saga (especially in the hands of a brilliant novelist). Claire Messud's latest novel tells the story of an Algerian-born French family from 1940 through 2010 as they navigate personal and political upheaval . . . Sold * Literary Hub * An excellent read . . . Above anything it's unrelentingly honest * Arts Desk * Messud's writing is exquisitely descriptive, painterly without being forced, with fresh imagery on every page, making the reader want to reread pages just for the pleasure of the elegance of the writing. I highly recommend * RichardHowe.com *