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Advanced Reviews

“In her debut novel Union Square, author Adrian Koesters brings to life the hardscrabble residents of a once grand neighborhood. Its denizens take us with them Rashomon-style through a single weekend, Thursday through Palm Sunday. Their often violent lives intersect in richly mysterious ways: a would-be Irish prizefighter ruins his prospects in exchange for the satisfaction of beating up a neighborhood rival. A recluse who can barely get out the door of his house finds himself hopping trains to help rescue the beaten boy. A girl on the cusp of adolescence falls in and out of love hourly, her physical and emotional turmoil carrying her into real danger. The place, the people, and the moods of an era are vividly evoked by Koesters’ gifts for visceral detail, dark humor, and the most forgiving sort of empathy. Scenes from this deeply evocative novel will stay with you like strange and unforgettable images from your dreams.”

— Mary Helen Stefaniak, author of The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia

“Union Square is about neighbors and neighborhoods, about the play of light and shadow, about spiritual connections made and lost. Honest, haunting, refreshingly idiosyncratic. I was captivated by the novel’s balance of nostalgia and gritty realism, and fascinated by the lives of these characters navigating prejudice and fear.”

— Timothy Schaffert, author of The Swan Gondola

“It is rare to find a debut novel written in such beautiful, lush prose and yet packing such a powerful punch that you feel as if the world has been knocked off its axis. Adrian Koesters shines as a brave new fiction talent in Union Square, a story that reverberates with rawness and truth-telling as a family confronts the darkness of its own secrets against the backdrop of the corruptions in their community. Koesters’ breathtaking lyricism shines on every page, lifting the characters and the reader beyond the darkness of their story toward the redemptive hope of connection.”

— Jonis Agee author of The Bones of Paradise

“I loved this book. It is flat-out the best thing I’ve read in several years, and that includes a number of award-winning novels. I hardly know how to describe the experience of reading it. Koesters reminds me of Virginia Woolf in her atmospheric power and ability to convey interiority, of Hemingway in her clarity and punch, and, once-in-a-lovely-while, of Cormac McCarthy in her syntactic drive and her swooping dives into metaphysical brooding. She gets everybody, from cocky-but-yearning teenage boys to psychically shattered, violent young men to snarky, guilty old pedophiles to heartbreakingly innocent young girls torn between desire and God. Really—if you have another novel you’ve started, put it aside and read this one. The other one will wait. This one will pin you to the wall.”

— Kent Meyers, author of Twisted Tree