The World to Come

Remarkable for their sheer range … Everything he writes is enriched by an underlying magnanimity. - Sunday Times

Retelling ‘real’ stories is Shepard’s forte. He is a dramatist with a reporter’s dispassion. The measured tone is pitch

perfect. There is no sense of sensationalism, no over-emoting, no embellishment. He lets his facts do the talking and in several of the stories in The World to Come the effect is devastating and affecting … He is a terrific writer whose arrival on these shores is long overdue. - Glasgow Herald

In ten meticulously researched stories, Shepard elegantly places the emotional dilemmas of morose, melancholy, misunderstood characters against backdrops that emphasise the vastness of the world and the smallness of their hopes and dreams … Wonderful - Daily Mail

Greedier writers would spin entire novels out of just one of the richly weird, hilariously bizarre premises that distinguish a Jim Shepard story. His stories can be set in any corner of the world, at any era in time, and there is no oddment or calamity of the human experience Shepard does not find fascinating. His stories are droll, action packed, ingenious and finally moving. - Colin Barrett

An outrageously versatile and gifted fiction writer, Shepard continues his original, precise exploration of times and places long ago and far, far away … Shepard’s project is always to push toward that sense of wonder and the ‘high hopefulness’ of purpose that ordinary people have always brought to the project of living - to give us through fiction a sense of profound empathy that the historical record alone cannot. He most stunningly succeeds - Washington Post

Like Alice Munro, Shepard has a knack for compressing a novel’s worth of life into thirty or forty pages … It all adds up to a peculiar yet arresting vision, as Shepard lets you see a startling variety of dangers and conundrums through the eyes of characters who, poignantly or even despairingly, can’t quite summon the humanity that’s hidden away in them - Boston Globe