“St. Ivo has an unexpectedly strong undertow. I didn’t realize how forcefully this novel had pulled me under each successive wave of revelations until suddenly I was on the last twenty pages and it was well after midnight. With glistening insight reminiscent of Tessa Hadley, Hershon exposes the tensions that inevitably form in long relationships and grow ever larger until somebody finally admits them out loud.”

—Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew

“I bit my nails to the quick while reading Joanna Hershon’s St. Ivo. Every page of it felt so charged with mystery, so thickly immediate. Over the course of this brief novel, unfolding over three days, she goes deep into important themes: marriage, motherhood, art-making, money, and loss. There’s danger in the world, but there’s also danger inside each of us, and Hershon’s sharp, supple prose shows us where the two intersect. I’ll be thinking about this powerful book for a long time.”

—Alix Ohlin, author of Dual Citizens

“From the very first sentences of St. Ivo, I felt certain I was in good hands. What happens when we can no longer communicate with the people we know best? What happens when what was once fluent between two people becomes indecipherable? Not a tender novel, exactly, though there is tenderness in these pages. In St. Ivo Joanna Hershon paints a portrait of grief, of survival, but also of hope. Anyone who has ever loved fiercely, desperately, will devour this story, as I did. The effect here is cumulative and I found myself reading the final pages with the book gripped in both hands.”

—Mary Beth Keane, author of Ask Again, Yes

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joanna Hershon

ST. IVO

Joanna Hershon is the author of four novels: Swimming, The Outside of August, The German Bride, and A Dual Inheritance. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, The Yale Review, One Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, and two literary anthologies, Brooklyn Was Mine and Freud’s Blind Spot. She teaches fiction in the MFA program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the painter Derek Buckner, and their three children. Visit her at www.joannahershon.com, or sign up for email updates here.

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