'Improvement is a major work of literature.' - Nick Hornby, The Believer

Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn't perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three-month stint in prison, their bond grows tighter. Kiki, now settled in New York after a journey that took her to Turkey and around the world, admires her niece's spirit but worries that she always picks the wrong man. Little does she know that the otherwise honourable Boyd is pulling Reyna into a scheme which violates his probation. When Reyna ultimately decides to remove herself for the sake of her four-year-old child, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them.

A novel that examines conviction, connection and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki's beloved Turkish rugs and as colourful as the tattoos decorating Reyna's body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us. The Boston Globe says of Joan Silber 'No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power.' Improvement is Silber's most shining achievement yet.

"A novel of richness and wisdom and huge pleasure" - New York Times Book Review

"[Improvement] daisychains several related narratives into a rich and surprising whole...Silber's superb handling of time - that Alice Munro tribute isn't wide of the mark - draws the disparate lives into a unity, and makes this compressed novel feel mysteriously capacious." - Guardian

"Silber is the genuine article, a writer of such precision, intelligence and insight that she makes you gasp...The characterisation is fantastic and the dialogue pitch-perfect." - Literary Review

"Improvement is a major work of literature....I love [Silber's] prose even more than I love her unconventional narrative approach. The first story, written in the first person, seems to me like the perfect lesson in voice, and anyone trying to write or to teach writing should read it. Reyna, the narrator, is funny, shrewd, laconic, fatalistic, something of a fuckup, and refreshingly unbookish; there isn't a single line that lets the reader down, or that allows you to suspect even for a second that this person isn't real." - The Believer

"Silber brings the skills of a short story writer to her novels, giving her characters enough space to breathe within the confines of the larger story, and every so often one will come across a jewel of a sentence that begs to be underlined or committed to memory." - Glasgow Herald

"[I]t feels vital to love Silber's work. . . Now is the moment to appreciate that she is here, in our midst: our country's own Alice Munro." - Washington Post

"Without fuss or flourishes, Joan Silber weaves a remarkably patterned tapestry connecting strangers from around the world to a central tragic car accident. The writing here is funny and down-to-earth, the characters are recognizably fallible, and the message is quietly profound: We are not ever really alone, however lonely we feel." - Wall Street Journal, top fiction titles of 2017

"An everyday masterpiece." - Newsday

"An elegant, generous portrait of interconnected lives." - Tatler

"Silber excels at quick, sharp portraiture...an exploration of the hopes, pains and small successes of very different people making their uncertain way through life." - Times Literary Supplement

"This gentle, absorbing story glides along on frictionless, understated prose; it feels wholly natural and unforced, as if the characters are recounting their own experiences, shorn of any artifice or make-believe." - Country & Townhouse Magazine