'No-one's there to watch her, so she just waits for the lights to turn on, waits to begin her performance.'

Guardian's Best Fiction of the Year

'One of the most original and exciting writers working in English today' - Jhumpa Lahiri

Once home to the country's most illustrious families, Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is now an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape, Ruthie learns how the town's prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history and how silence often masks a legacy of harm - from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends.

In Very Cold People Sarah Manguso reveals the suffocating constraints of growing up in a very old, and very cold, small town. Here lies a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smouldering rage . . .

'Chilling . . . deeply impressive' - Guardian
'A masterclass in unease' - The Observer

Longlisted for the Wingate Prize 2023

"A masterclass in unease" - Observer

"Manguso puts her own indelible stamp on the literary terrain of John Cheever and Susan Minot, daring to brush against the third rail of class." - Oprah Daily

"With its adult narrator trying to recover the intuitions of her younger self, Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet." - New Yorker

"Manguso is consistent in her approach and the cumulative effect is satisfying" - TLS

"Midwesterners, New Englanders and anyone from small town America will recognize the contours in this quietly beautiful novel about what it feels like to grow up an outsider. It's a starkly lyrical exploration of the darkness that lies underneath a lily white community with an emotional resonance that sneaks up on you and won't let go." - Good Housekeeping

"The book is strong enough as a compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived. The effect is cumulative, and this novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight" - New York Times

"Manguso’s attention to the chilliness and reservation of certain New Englanders crackles like a room-temperature beverage poured over ice . . . Manguso portrays the fears surrounding girlhood with a blistering clarity." - Washington Post

"Chilling . . . Set in the 1980s in a small, frigid New England town, this coming-of-age story offers a stark take on what it is to feel poor, poorly nurtured, and inadequately loved in a class-conscious, lily-white town whose antique houses were built and occupied by generations of Cabots and Emersons . . . absorbs our attention and stirs empathy and reflection." - NPR

"Very Cold People wields a kind of detached, anthropological power, portraying the world through the accumulation of telling details." - Wall Street Journal

"Unafraid to engage with tricky topics like race and class in America, Very Cold People may not warm your heart, necessarily. But it will pick you up after it knocks you down, and leave you stronger for it." - Chicago Review of Books

"Manguso is a lovely writer about unlovely things . . . here she depicts her protagonist’s quiet agony with a poet’s eye . . . A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful." - Kirkus, (starred review)

"Manguso is an exquisitely astute writer, and there is something admirable about her refusal to bow to predictable plot tropes that might rescue Ruthie more definitively — or condemn her." - Boston Globe

"Her rendering of violence, abuse and secrecy within families and communities is clear-eyed and almost uncomfortably lyrical — the beauty of her writing makes the tragedies she describes feel all the more wrenching." - Los Angeles Times

"Manguso excels at capturing the perspective of a child desperate for the love of people who don’t know how to give it. " - The Spectator