The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

"Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is that most unusual and wondrous of things: a novel that wants to educate our hearts. Beneath her highly graceful and entertaining prose, Waldman has a moral project in mind, she seeks to extend our sympathies and (with great charm) shame us into becoming better versions of ourselves. Her novel is constantly witty and profound. It is also a reminder that novels can be far more than pleasant diversions, they can be highly sophisticated tools that help us to grow up."

I can't remember the last novel this good about being young and smart and looking for love in the big city. It's as if one of the top tier nineteenth-century novelists zeroed in their social x-ray eyes onto present-day Brooklyn. I bet untold readers will be squirming with uncomfortable recognition; many more will be thanking Adelle Waldman for this hilarious, big-hearted, ruthlessly intelligent, and ridiculously well-written novel. -- Charles Bock (Author Of The Bestselling Beautiful Children) Deliciously funny, sharply observed, elegantly told, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is the best debut novel I've encountered in years, the best novel about New York, and the best novel about contemporary manhood and the crazy state of gender roles and 'contemporary' life. With a pitch-perfect balance of satire and sympathy, reminiscent of Mary McCarthy's The Group, Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, and Jay McInerney's Brightness Falls, Adelle Waldman's voice is nevertheless entirely - and unabashedly - her own. -- Joanna Smith Rakoff (Author Of A Fortunate Age) Bracing and astute. Waldman writes these crisp, smart sentences that are every bit as thoughtful as her characters - people whose relationships founder and flourish in ways that will captivate readers from page one. -- Fiona Maazel (Author Of Last Last Chance And Woke Up Lonely) Novelist Adelle Waldman does a very tricky thing: she succeeds in crossing the gender line, imagining the world from behind the eyes of a male character both sympathetically and unsentimentally. This former young-literary-man-in-Brooklyn found himself cringing in recognition. -- William Deresiewicz (Author Of A Jane Austen Education) This sharp, unsentimental debut novel is as fiercely intelligent as it is deliciously cheeky and well-observed. Literary Brooklyn and its striving inhabitants may never again be so unsparingly - and so winningly - portrayed. I can't wait to read more from Adelle Waldman. -- Joanna Hershon (Author Of The German Bride And A Dual Inheritance)