Fame and Honour - Hardcover

Tart observational powers... hugely funny (NYTimes.com)

Cleverly constructed...an elegy wrapped inside a satire, a sorrowful meditation on the mysteries of sibling love and rivalry concealed within a bitterly funny chronicle of literary buffoonery. Jincy Willett is a fearless writer, capable of startling the reader into rueful laughter at every turn (Tom Perrotta, author of JOE COLLEGE)

A brilliant black comedy...Poignant and funny, mean and tender, Willett's novel is exuberantly original (Publishers Weekly)

Utterly cunning and clever novel in which Willett blends wry understatement with wise understanding... An exceptional debut novel from a fresh, funny, and facile writer (Carol Haggas, Booklist)

"A well wrought piece of fiction," the heroine of this novel declares, "helps us make sense out of the chaos of our lives. Why be deliberately obscure when real life is so impossibly fractured and opaque?" Well exactly... So: hurrah for Jincy Willett, and for her funny, charming, humane, and altogether well-wrought piece of fiction (Kurt Andersen, author of TURN OF THE CENTURY)

Willett's prose is whip smart, at times howlingly funny - and just sad enough to keep the sisters' rivalries achingly real (Elle)

Willett plays artfully with narrative structure... It's Dorcas's jaded take on every Yankee pretension, psycho-babble truism and literary delusion she encounters that makes this gothic tale so amusing (Seattle Times)

'The funniest novel I have read, possibly ever. Brilliant, totally original, and worthy of its title. I promise you will laugh constantly and to the point of stomach damage.' - Augusten Burroughs (Augusten Burroughs)

Dorcas's deadpan narration is perfect... Willett's hapless characters are, in the end: grotesquely flawed, hugely funny, but human (Boston Herald)

A sharp, highly original satire (Time Out New York)

Rhode Island, New England, the present day. A hurricane is on its way and the locals are either packing up and clearing out, or buying emergency provisions and preparing to batten down the hatches. Dorcas Mather, local librarian and spinster, is less concerned by the imminent threat than about a book that's come in with the most recent delivery. It's THE ABIGAIL MATHER STORY - a true crime epic which supposedly tells the true story of Dorcas's sexually promiscuous sister Abigail, who's now serving a life sentence for killing her husband. As the storm rages on, Dorcas reads, rages at the inaccurate picture of her allegedly 'dysfunctional' family and the man who tore her sister's life apart, then tells us the 'real truth', although we sense she's hiding something, and knows more about the murder than she's letting on. Perhaps Abigail isn't the guilty one after all?