The three novellas collected together in Things to Come and Go showcase Bette Howland at her best. Written just before she won the MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 1984, these intimate portraits of Jewish family life are by turns equally truthful and bittersweet.

‘Reminiscent of Edna O’Brien, with shades too of Jean Rhys.’ – The Irish Times

Things to Come and Go showcases the incomparable talent of Bette Howland in three novellas of stunning power, beauty, and sustaining humour.

‘Birds of a Feather’ is a daughter’s story of her extended, first-generation family, the ‘big, brassy yak-yakking Abarbanels’. Esti, a merciless, astute observer, recalls growing up amid (the confusions and difficulties of) their history, quarrels, judgements, noisy love and inescapable bonds of blood.

In ‘The Old Wheeze’ a single mother in her twenties returns to her sunless apartment after a date at the ballet. Shifting between four viewpoints – the young woman, the older professor who took her out, her son, and her son’s babysitter – the story masterfully captures the impossibility of liberating ourselves from the self.

In ‘The Life You Gave Me’, a woman at the midpoint of life is called to her father’s sickbed. A lament for all that is forever unsaid and unsayable, the story is ‘an anguished meditation on growing up, growing old and being left behind, a complaint against time.’ (The New York Times)

First published in 1984, Things to Come and Go, Bette Howland’s final book, is a collection of haunting urgency about arrivals and departures, and the private, insoluble dramas in the lives of three women.

With an introduction by Rumaan Alam, bestselling author of Leave the World Behind.

"Howland's striking prose breathes life into the everyday, the domestic world sung with a lyrical note . . . reminiscent of Edna O'Brien, with shades too of Jea Rhys." - Irish Times

"Beneath the bright patter and eye-catching descriptions, each story has sadness at its core . . . a flood of energetic storytelling." - Washington Post

"A writer of unusual talent, power and intelligence . . . A vigorous, original voice, an incisive mind and an uncompromised lyrical vision . . . Stunning power and beauty abound in this book; it is a trove of lyric riches." - New York Times

"The three novellas that constitute Things to Come and Go feel, at moments, like thinly disguised autobiography. With her flexible stance toward reality, her eye for the amusing, curious minutiae of existence, and her tonal range . . . Howland recalls the short-story writer Lucia Berlin." - Harper's Magazine

"There’s no more interesting tale of neglect and rediscovery than that of Bette Howland." - Paris Review

"[Howland's] rhythmic sentences and striving characters resonate as much today as they did when first written in the 1970s and early 80s . . . one of American literature’s rising stars." - iNews

"Howland’s great theme is the shared ache of human existence, a commonality that sometimes unites us, but more often divides and isolates. She captures this paradoxical push-pull between the longing and the resistance to connect" - New York Jewish Week