I Cheerfully Refuse
by Leif Enger
You must sign in to see if this title is available for request. Sign In or Register Now
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date 3 Apr 2025 | Archive Date 6 Apr 2025
Atlantic Books | Grove Press UK
Talking about this book? Use #ICheerfullyRefuse #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
Barnes & Noble's April Book Club Pick
An Amazon Top 10 Editors' Pick
One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of the Year
A bereaved musician takes to Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved bookselling wife. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amid the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humour, generous strangers and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. As his essentially guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy's private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake.
A rollicking narrative in the most evocative of settings, I Cheerfully Refuse is a symphony against despair and a rallying cry for the future.
Advance Praise
'A book that reads like music, both battle hymn and love song for our world' Violet Kupersmith, author of Build Your House Around My Body
'A rare, remarkable book to be kept and reread - for its beauty of language, its gentle wisdom and its steady, unflagging hope' Minneapolis Star Tribune
'Enger casts this adventure as an Orphean quest, but once Rainy takes on a young sidekick who's also on the lam, the enterprise feels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn reconceived by Cormac McCarthy' Ron Charles, Washington Post
'As readable as anything [Enger] has written, [I Cheerfully Refuse] refreshingly concerns itself less with the miraculous than with what is right before our eyes, even when we want to look away' Wall Street Journal
'An unusual and meaningful surprise awaits readers of Enger's latest...[his] retelling of Orpheus (who went to the underworld to rescue his wife) contains the authentic hope of a born optimist' Los Angeles Times
'The transcendent latest from Enger [...]is at once a dystopian love story, a nautical adventure and a meditation on loss, kindness and natural beauty . . . This captivating narrative brims with hope' Publishers Weekly (starred review)
'There's both a playfulness and a seriousness of purpose to the latest from the Minnesota novelist, a spirit of whimsy that keeps hope flickering even in times of darkest despair' Kirkus Reviews
Available Editions
| EDITION | Mass Market Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781804710821 |
| PRICE | £9.99 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 336 |
Links
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Tracy S, Librarian
I really enjoyed this book. The words are poetic and rather beautiful.
It is about grief anf coming to terms with feelings and loss. It is a slow pace read and I rather enjoyed the plot and it seemed to me that the story was a metaphor about the actual happening.
It is unusual but I honestly found it uplifting and I am quite happy to recommend
Claire C, Reviewer
The writing style was a little staccato at the start and took a few pages to get into the rhythm of it. Well worth it, once you enter the flow. I loved this book, for its highs and lows, which come painfully crashing into each other.
Don’t expect a full explanation of how and why the future world has turned dysfunctional. There’s just enough details to roll with the story, and snippets of detail emerge throughout the book to allow us to follow the protagonist, Rainy as he’s forced from his fragile balance of happiness, on a voyage of escape.
Despite the challenging circumstances of life in this future reality, the champions in the story are those who find joy in what appears to be the darkest of times. The lows and depravity which brought the world to its future dystopia only seek to contrast against the highlights - books, literature, friends, music. Great interweaving of events which allows the colour and contrast between the oscillations to show.
Succinctly written, beautifully laid out and well worth a read.
Readers who liked this book also liked:
