The Convalescent

The Convalescent is the story of a small, bearded man selling meat out of a bus parked next to a stream in suburban Virginia . . . and also, somehow, the story of 10,000 years of Hungarian history. Jessica Anthony, the inaugural winner of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, makes an unforgettable debut with an unforgettable hero: Rovar Ákos Pfliegman - unlikely bandit, unloved lover, and historian of the unimportan


Genre: Literary Fiction

"Jessica Anthony has given a voice - wry, sad, and arresting - to the wounded little homunculus that lives, largely ignored, in all of us, a creature that wrestles with a guilt and grief that is as historical as it is personal. The Convalescent is a melancholy delight." - Chris Adrian

"The Convalescent is a fleshy fable spinning in and out of its own enormous, fabulous history. It is lush, cranky, and powered by dark, sweet humor. Mesmerizing. And a lot of fun. I enjoyed it completely." - Katherine Dunn

"A blissfully nutty, brainy, ribald, brilliantly imaginative ode to human loneliness, oddity, and persistence." - Francisco Goldman

"Jessica Anthony is a writer possessed of mind-bending talents. Inconceivably, she's written a novel that's innocent and wise, grave and hilarious, bleak and hopeful, fast-paced and meditative, heartbreaking and heart healthy, evanescent and concrete. Reading it, I felt as though I'd stumbled upon a magical text that might, at any moment, disappear from my hands. The Convalescent is that kind of special." - Heidi Julavits