Our Better Natures

Our Better Natures is an elixir of hard-won inspiration and risky curiosity. Set against the tumult of the 1970s, this taut novel unfolds with elegant precision and vulnerability, examining the inner lives of a poet, a small-town housewife, and an activist all navigating change and choice as their known worlds collapse. Our Better Natures is a stunning meditation on hope, its fragile insistence, driven by Sophie Ward's singular wit and astounding philosophical playfulness. It cements Ward's place as one of our most inventive, inquisitive and alert novelists working today * MARGOT DOUAIHY *
Our Better Natures is potent and beguiling. It makes one see with a better eye -- LAURA CARLIN
Our Better Natures is an absolute marvel - a marvel of ideas, full of intellectual delights; a marvel of construction that propels us toward the most unexpected - and inevitable - outcomes; a marvel of writing, elegant, poised, wise, achingly beautiful at times, but never pulling focus from the stories of the three women and the people around them; and a marvel of compassion. A truly magnificent creation -- NANCY CRANE
Our Better Natures is a triumph of literary empathy, an intellectual adventure connecting Korean immigrants in the US midwest to the activist Andrea Dworkin in Amsterdam to the poet Muriel Rukeyser as she protests the Vietnam war. Sophie Ward miraculously joins each living, breathing dot of this unique novel to build a convincing picture of a turbulent, formative cultural and social moment * RICHARD BEARD *
'Sophie Ward's inventive novel... seamlessly integrates the real private and public lives of Andrea Dworkin and Muriel Rukeyser with the fictional world of Phyllis Patterson... Ward fleshes out her real-life characters with complete conviction, deftly threading their own words into the fabric of her fiction' -- Michael Arditti * Financial Times *