The Call - by Yannick Murphy (Paperback)

About the Book

Murphy presents a beautifully written novel about a family of five in rural New England, told through the charming, witty, and loving voice of the veterinarian father.

Book Synopsis

"Yannick Murphy, while being one of our most daring andoriginal writers, is first and foremost an exquisitely attuned observer ofhuman behavior. . . . Murphy's work provides pretty much unexceededreading pleasure." --Dave Eggers

Thewarm, wry, and patient voice of a veterinarian father tells the heartfelt storyof his young New England family enduring a moving trial of loyalty, hope, andfaith after they are confronted with an unthinkable crisis. Acclaimed author Yannick Murphy's intimate narrative style and lovely prosewill enthrall readers of Rivka Galchen, Padgett Powell, and Murphy's own Signed, Mata Hari.The Call is a "triumph of quiet humorand understated beauty" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) from anauthor that the New York Times Book Review calls "an extraordinarilygifted fabulist."

From the Back Cover

The daily rhythm of a veterinarian's family in rural New England is shaken when a hunting accident leaves their eldest son in a coma. With the lives of his loved ones unhinged, the veterinarian struggles to maintain stability while searching for the man responsible. But in the midst of their great trial an unexpected visitor arrives, requesting a favor that will have profound consequences--testing a loving father's patience, humor, and resolve and forcing husband and wife to come to terms with what "family" truly means.

The Call is a gift from one of the most talented and extraordinary voices in contemporary fiction--a unique and heartfelt portrait of a family, poignant and rich in humor and imagination.

Review Quotes

"Intense, atmospheric and erotic, this is more prose poem than historical novel." - Kirkus
Praise for Yannick Murphy's Signed, Mata Hari: "Murphy is an extraordinarily gifted fabulist. [Signed, Mata Hari is] completely original, ... [a] beguiling evocation." Editor's Choice! - Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review
"[An] alluring novel, ... hypnotic [and as] softly poetic as it is insistent, [Signed, Mata Hari] entices the reader from the first lines to give Mata Hari what she always craved: not the secrets that are the currency of a spy, but the rapt attention that is oxygen to a performer." - Starred Review, Publisher's Weekly
"In the fictionalized confessional Signed, Mata Hari, Yannick Murphy reincarnates the legendary seductress who was accused of being a double agent in World War I, giving her a lyrical voice and an irrepressible vivacity. . . . Most of the twists and gyrations take place on the page, not the stage, [and by] the time her last morning arrives and she walks out to face a French firing squad--sans blindfold--we feel as besotted with this passionate, provocative woman as were the rest of her hapless admirers." - Corrie Pikul, ELLE
"[Mata Hari's] often-overshadowed life provides the emotional core of Yannick Murphy's wondrous novel, Signed, Mata Hari. Zelle's death was merely the tragic end of a tragic life, and here Murphy, through exquisite and lush fiction, creates as fully-drawn a portrait of her as any biographer could have done." - Renée Graham, The Boston Globe
"Unself-consciously sensual and achingly beautiful, [Signed, Mata Hari consists of] short, exquisite, though never precious, chapters refined almost to a sequence of prose poems. [This] is a profound and profoundly beautiful novel, one that forcefully renews literary fiction's claim to be a laboratory of the human spirit." - Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times
"This subtle, beautifully rendered novel is one of the best books of the year." - Flavorwire
"[An] inventive novel . . . told with wry wit and unabashed anger, the story unfolds through the rural veterinarian's call notes." - Bark
"The Call surprised me from the first page to the last and delighted me on every one in between. . . . I feel lucky to have read it." - Yankee Magazine
"Its peculiar charm eludes easy categorization. The most striking element of The Call is its distinctive structure: The story comes to us in a stream of statements and summaries, as in the veterinarian's medical logbook or journal. . . . With its combination of Yankee stoicism and offhand poetry, the book conveys the slightly archaic feel of a biblical parable, a real accomplishment in today's hyper-contemporary fictional landscape. All told, The Call is definitely worth answering." - Washington Post
"Its peculiar charm eludes easy categorization. . . . With its combination of Yankee stoicism and offhand poetry, the book conveys the slightly archaic feel of a biblical parable, a real accomplishment in today's hyper-contemporary fictional landscape. All told, The Call is definitely worth answering." - Washington Post
"This is a beautiful book, and one that partly due to its mechanism but mostly due to its prowess at considering how life goes, is one that should act as a great model for using form as a scaffolding for innovation of approach, while also firing from the hip of the voice and the blood of why people started telling stories ever at all." - HTML Giant
"This is a beautiful book, and . . . one that should act as a great model for using form as a scaffolding for innovation of approach, while also firing from the hip of the voice and the blood of why people started telling stories ever at all." - HTML Giant
"The Call, a beguiling novel by Yannick Murphy, is that rarest of creatures: a book about a happy family. Not a perfect family, not a family without struggles but still, a generous and decent family who find themselves thrown off balance by a series of random and unsettling events." - Valley News
"A quirky, artful and ultimately moving story of a year in the life of country vet." - Shelf Awareness
"Undeniably fascinating. . . . Yannick Murphy's The Call is a one-of-a-kind story...filled with forthright, understated prose reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's." - The Daily Beast
"Displaying an almost magical economy. . . . The Call conjures the quirky satisfactions of rural life . . . true heroism is revealed in the humanity of a taciturn and decent man." - People (4 stars)
"Remarkable. . . . Suspenseful . . . The truthful evocation of family is the real triumph of 'The Call'. There is much love in this novel, and just as much truth about the pain and pleasure of family life. 'What is taking place is as layered as something in nature, ' writes Murphy of an encounter between two of her characters. She could well be describing her own clever and beautiful book." - Boston Globe
"Remarkable. . . . The truthful evocation of family is the real triumph of The Call. There is much love in this novel, and just as much truth about the pain and pleasure of family life. . . . [A] clever and beautiful book." - Boston Globe
"Murphy pays close attention to the sensual and the macabre. . . . In the quotidian details of farm life, Murphy demonstrates how crucial it is to focus on the small, real tasks in the face of something too big and too dark to understand." - Time Out New York
"The restraint around the narrative [in The Call] only highlights the beauty of Murphy's prose. . . . [Her] eye for poignant details sells this refreshingly upbeat portrait of a man's quiet strength." - Orlando Sentinel
"Incisive and imaginative. . . . [A] hypnotically patterned, wryly funny, and warmly compassionate tale . . . .With phenomenal economy and delicious deadpan humor, Murphy dramatizes . . . the many forms of giving and healing." - Booklist (starred review)
"Impossible to put down. . . . Refreshingly full, honest depth. . . . This is a novel's novel, the kind of book that can't spare a word, that's perfectly insular but still manage to enlighten readers about their own lives." - Portland Mercury
"The Call takes the form of a series of wry, terse bulletins about the stresses and joys of work and family. The narrator -- or diarist -- is a veterinarian who lives in rural Vermont with his wife, a harried homemaker/writer, their three children, and their two Newfoundland dogs. . . . If this sounds prosaic, let me stress that The Call is anything but: it is fresh and beguiling on several levels....The portrait of family life that emerges in The Call -- at once ironic and warm -- is 'as layered as something in nature.' Wonderful." - Barnes and Noble
"If I had one plink of the magic wand this week, I'd inject Yannick Murphy's jaunty, original novel The Call into the best-seller mix. Here is a book to break the formula, both edgy and moving. . . . The Call builds into an exquisite, pointed poem to domesticity, written by the paterfamilias, who is eccentric in the way we are all eccentric when we let our thoughts surface. . . . Murphy, who lives in Vermont and wrote the astutely sensuous novel Signed, Mata Hari in 2007, creates a different book on every outing, each a reverie and a joy. She is that rarity: a sharp writer unafraid to be tender." - Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Here is a book to break the formula, both edgy and moving. . . . [it] builds into an exquisite, pointed poem to domesticity . . . Unexpected and stirring . . . [Murphy] is that rarity: a sharp writer unafraid to be tender." - Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Wondrously dynamic. . . . A warm-hearted paean to family devotion." - Wall Street Journal
"The Call is an enormously affecting and lovely exploration of ordinary and extraordinary love. In prose that is as grand, startling, and particular as the New England landscape that inhabits her characters as much as they inhabit it, Yannick Murphy tells a story that will break and repair your heart." - Chris Adrian, author of The Great Night
"Murphy's eye for small-town detail and human/animal relations makes for a complex, delicate story line, and the novel as a whole carries a very real human velocity and gravity. The domestic focus and unexpected intrusions recall fiction by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida." - Library Journal
"Murphy is a subtle, psychologically perceptive writer, and the book has a wry humor that's laconic and surreal and shot through with the tender mysteries of family life. . . . A marvelous book: sweet and poignant without ever succumbing to easy sentiment, formally inventive and dexterous without ever seeming showy. A triumph." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Murphy is a subtle, psychologically perceptive writer. . . . A marvelous book: sweet and poignant without ever succumbing to easy sentiment, formally inventive and dexterous without ever seeming showy. A triumph." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Whiting Award winner Murphy is both incisive and imaginative, pirouetting from the richly interpretive Signed, Mata Hari (2007) to this hypnotically patterned, wryly funny, and warmly compassionate tale of a New England veterinarian under duress. . . . Visceral detail and deep knowledge stoke this gorgeously realized novel of a good man's struggle with anger, fear, and duty. With phenomenal economy and delicious deadpan humor, Murphy dramatizes small-town contrariness, the fearful beauty and power of nature, the preciousness of ordinary family routines, and the many forms of giving and healing." - Booklist (starred review)
"There is beauty in these snapshots alone, yet the most striking moments appear as they play fugue to one another. . . . Told through the prose of the father's daily log, The Call is a subtle, lush, and ultimately, masterful novel." - Nylon Magazine
"A nifty trick of a novel. The quick summer read that transcends its category. [It] thoroughly engrosses, entertains, and, finally, enlightens. . . . By way of recommending Yannick Murphy and The Call, I point out that it is the rare novel that is good enough to send the reader off to seek and find the author's earlier books (novels Signed, Mata Hari, Here They Come and The Sea of Trees, plus short story collections and children's books) in order to enjoy them as well. And, in the end, what higher praise is there than that?" - New York Journal of Books
"The Call is a nifty trick of a novel. The quick summer read that transcends its category. [It] thoroughly engrosses, entertains, and, finally, enlightens." - New York Journal of Books
"Yannick Murphy's The Call, about a family dealing with the consequences of a tragic accident, explores marriage, parenthood, small-town life, medicine, and hope with a sensitivity, skill, and fearlessness that will rattle your bones." - Ben Greenman, author of Celebrity Chekhov and What He's Poised to Do
"Yannick Murphy's beautiful new novel is a stirring example of what a real writer can do with form and feeling. The Call is sly, funny, scary, honest, wonderstruck and, most of all, intensely generous." - Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask
"This is a wonderful novel. Original, suspenseful, funny and profoundly moving. It's about family, community, the human bond with animals and--oh yeah--spaceships. I am in awe of Yannick Murphy's achievement and I plan to recommend The Call to everyone I know." - Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Caleb's Crossing
"Murphy ... offers a vision that is deeply subjective without being deeply interior. Her story unfolds through a dreamlike progression of glinting surfaces, telling gestures and precisely rendered moments in which matter-of-fact horror butts up against absurdist hilarity.... Murphy imbues her world, ultimately, with a lush timelessness, shot through with surprising buoyancy and hope." - Catherine Bush, The New York Times, on Sea of Trees
"This striking, surreal first novel ... gradually gathers weight and attains a vivid, harrowing beauty." - People, on Sea of Trees
"Yannick Murphy's first novel describes, with an eye for both beauty and irony, [the story of] and young girl's ... realization that home is no longer a physical place: ...a poetic narrative of strength and survival." - Bomb, on Sea of Trees
"This inspiring view of the unvanquished human soul belongs in all collections." - Library Journal, on Sea of Trees
"A triumph of quiet humor and understated beauty. . . . Murphy's subtle, wry wit and an appealing sense for the surreal leaven moments of anger and bleakness, and elevate moments of kindness, whimsy, and grace." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This book delights with its discrete structuring. . . . The pieces snap together in odd juxtaposition, surprising, making a picture more sturdy and dependable than the seamless whole. It has the power of good old Byzantine mosaic." - Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood
"In thick, poetic prose that edges toward stream of consciousness and is peppered with slightly surreal details, Murphy creates a world as magical and harrowing as the struggle to come to grips with maturity." - Publisher's Weekly, starred review, on Here They Come
"Yannick Murphy creates a narrator with a unique, sometimes shocking perspective. Murphy's startling language and imagery accumulate great power as they hurtle toward the reader." - People Magazine, on Here They Come
"Murphy flawlessly captures a child's-eye view of a battered society and a battered family. The spare elegance of her prose contrasts so jarringly with the sordid physical landscape that it inspires an unsettling sense of disconnect, which is almost certainly the point. Most impressive of all is Murphy's remarkable use of language, the expressive way she puts together ordinary words and images to create surprisingly lovely and moving metaphors...." - Wendy Smith, LA Times, on Here They Come
"With remarkable restraint and lyrical prose, Murphy builds a novel moment by moment, showing us a strange world through the eyes of a girl who thinks nothing of it. Not once does our gal even consider the idea that she might be the object of pity; she's got a gum-smacking, even cruel demeanor, and we're grateful for it. How refreshing it is ... to see a fictional adolescent who can be precocious without ever being dear." - Pete Coco, Time Out Chicago, on Here They Come
"[A] mixture of naturalism and surrealism [that] is intriguing-and well written...." - Booklist, on Here They Come
"[Yannick Murphy] navigates ... calamity with virtuosic language and bone-dry humor so that the result is a wholly unsentimental but peculiarly hopeful portrait of family love and growing up scarred but sturdy." - Michelle Huneven, LA Weekly, on Here They Come
"Brilliant in its structure, beautiful in its language, rich in its characterization, Yannick Murphy's new novel, Signed, Mata Hari, also happens to have at its center one of the most fascinating figures of the early twentieth century, a woman who ached deeply and searched intensely for an identity. In Murphy's masterful hands, this quest is tenderly and movingly rendered." - Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
"The award-winning Murphy [has created in] Mata Hari a fictional persona marked by sensitivity, desperation, and longing. Murphy effectively builds tension concerning Mata Hari's fate. . . . The novel is as fascinating as Mata Hari herself and occasionally brilliant in the way it re-creates her life. . . . " - Library Journal
"Murphy has devised a persona who is willful, dreamy, convinced of the validity of her own perceptions, sexually generous, and incorrigibly naive. The life of the senses coats these pages: textures, smells, flavors. . . . I found myself rushing through the final pages--to an ending that satisfies, opening out into a kaleidoscopic tribute, at once tender and wise." - Joan Frank, San Francisco Chronicle
"[A] sensual, accomplished novel. Mata Hari on these pages is as sensual as her bare feet on the straw mats of Java, as embodied as the sweat on the back of her knees. She is superstitious, enigmatic and sympathetic, porous to stories, childlike at times, cunning at others. Murphy packs more grace and vision into ... six paragraphs than most novelists manage to put into an entire book. It is poetry. Yannick Murphy ... lets the reader think about seducing and being seduced anew." - Karen Long, The Plain Dealer
"Yannick Murphy is a uniquely talented writer who manages to turn everything on its head and make dark, funny, shocking and beautiful prose out of the detritus of growing up poor, fatherless, and cockeyed. She is fearless." - Lily Tuck, Winner of the 2004 National Book Award, on Here They Come
"Yannick Murphy's ... Here They Come is a unique combination of rare linguistic lyricism with brutal and brilliant prose. It is an unrelenting portrait of family, terrifying for its honesty, its willingness to be ugly and elegant. Haunting." - A.M. Homes, author of The Safety of Objects and Music For Torching, on Here They Come
"Does the literary world need another fictional tribute to Mata Hari? If it is penned by the inimitable Murphy, the answer is yes. [A] seductive narrative, ... Murphy has fashioned a mesmerizing novel that creatively reimagines the life of one of the most notorious, and perhaps overvilified, women of all time." - Booklist
"This impressionistic, erotic novel ... probes beneath the well-known facts of Mata Hari's life ... to evoke the pleasure and sustenance in her experiences and the poetry in the mystery of whether she really was a spy." - Thelma Adams, More
"More stunning, even, than this lush, luscious prose is how Yannick Murphy turns preconceived notions inside out. Rendered with great insight and compassion, Murphy's Mata Hari is revealed, not as a spy, but as a sympathetic and intensely complicated woman. A wife, a mother, a lover, an artist, she is worthy of our admiration and of our hearts. Signed, Mata Hari is a thrilling and a devastating novel." - Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of An Almost Perfect Moment
"In this atmospheric novel of seductively brief chapters, Murphy reimagines the many blanks of Hari's sexed-up history. This compelling mix of erotic poetry, bio, and thriller makes a sympathetic case that Hari was less a spy than a busy courtesan who opted to bed both German and Allied officers." - Beth Johnson, Entertainment Weekly
"The events leading up to [Mata Hari's execution] still remain shrouded in mystery, but in the intoxicating new novel Signed, Mata Hari, Yannick Murphy imaginatively fills in the gaps. The result is a sympathetic portrayal of one of the 20th century's most vilified women: Murphy's Mata Hari is not a callous femme fatale but an ordinary mother forced to do extraordinary things to survive." - Time Out New York