'A work of genius'Ben Fountain

'A bittersweet book, but also a sharp and profoundly wise one'Herald

'Searcy writes with an urgency that makes his essays matter. Where the shame comes in is not certain, but the wonder is that you begin a year having never heard of an author then, two weeks in, his words are lodged in your consciousness and you are telling everybody you know to read his book'Independent Like dispatches from another world, the twenty-one essays in David Searcys debut collectionShame and Wonderare unfamiliar, profound and haunting.

In his late sixties, the Texan author David Searcy became drawn to non-fiction, writing straight-up, on note pad and manual typewriter, a series of disparate thoughts and interests. These unframed apprehensions, as he called them of forgotten baseball fields, childhood dreams of space travel, the bedtime stories hed invent for his young children evolved into a sequence of extraordinary essays probing the pivots and pathways of his life, and puzzling out what they might mean.

Expansive in scope, but deeply personal in their perspective, the pieces inShame and Wonderforge beautiful connections that make the everyday seem almost extraterrestrial, creating intricate and glittering constellations of words and ideas. Radiant and strange and suffused with longing, this collection is a work of true grace, wisdom and joy.