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Read What Critics are Saying

The Storms of May

"Solid, old-fashioned fiction updated with frank language, sex, and an underclass milieu: a natural for any reading group not wedded to middle-class domestic dramas." —Kirkus Reviews


A Garden of Demons

"Hower is a fine storyteller and a first-rate writer... a fast-moving and affecting tale." —Robert Stone


Shadows & Elephants

"The seething mood and weather of India are captured memorably [and the] the ferment of ideas that was colonial India is richly suggested in the latest from Hower who retells the story of Theosophical Society founders Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott in their 19th-century quest for a legitimate home for spiritualist beliefs." —Kirkus Reviews

"Hower paints a compelling picture of the spiritualist movement and the celebrities it drew. The book works on two levels, as both history and character study, and it is certain to be a welcome addition to the small but noteworthy sub-genre of fiction dealing with spiritualism." —Publishers Weekly

"A wonderfully readable study of a brilliant fraud and her chief accomplice. The action moves quickly from the United States to India and Ceylon, the homeland of mystics and fakirs. India, in Hower's prose, becomes a major character; it gleams and sweats with sensuality, mystery and humanity. This is a stunning book, vivid, dramatic and full of warmth."
—Edmund White

"An affecting story of love and friendship filled with unusual, unexpected (and all too human) twists and turns."
—Ann Beattie

"I have never read a book which fulfills so completely John Gardner's idea that a novel should be a "continuous dream." From its evocative title to the astonishing "ascension" of its mysterious heroine at the end, Shadows and Elephants is a mesmerizing experience for the reader." —Lee Smith


Queen of the Silver Dollar

"Hower's fifth novel is amusing and insightful. Readers will root for oversized June Chatwin, who has landed herself at a Connecticut asylum, as she learns that the best therapy often comes from other patients rather than professionals and that the biggest ghosts from our pasts are often ourselves." —Alice Adams


Night Train Blues

"Hower brings such strong intelligence, wisdom and passion to his fiction. My heart breaks for these people, especially the fathers and sons, as they go back to the well again and again for new possibilities. It is time this fine writer has the wide audience he deserves." —Lewis Nordan

"Edward Hower portrays the ugliness and out-of-control violence of a 'privileged upbringing; and also, with marvelous sensitivity, depicted what is the book's central and major love: that between the boy and his nurse." —Alice Adams


Wolf Tickets

"Wolf Tickets is a tough and powerful novel that makes a girls' reformatory as real as the streets the girls came from. It's a pathetic cosmos, full of trauma, violence, and heartbreak, but also salvation of a kind - a novel of panoramic social disaster in which the beating of the human heart is always audible. Edward Hower, with a sure eye for detail and an accurate ear for human speech, is a writer of talent and substance." —William Kennedy

"In Wolf Tickets, Edward Hower carries off beautifully one of the most difficult and ambitious of fictional tasks, that of defining a large number of characters, each of whom has a particular predicament and a unique character. The combination of objectivity with sympathy or understanding allows an insight that is rare in fiction into the lives of young people who are usually dismissed as 'troubled', or are sensationalized or turned into case studies." —James McConkey

"I like Wolf Tickets very much; once I started reading it I couldn't stop. It's about a subject seldom treated in our contemporary literature, and Edward Hower characterizes these lost, abused and misused girls with such sympathy and understanding that they are impossible to forget once you've put the book down. The book is very well-written, and exciting and suspenseful as well as enlightening. A remarkable, an important book." —Susan Kenney


The New Life Hotel

"A beautifully rendered story." —The New York Times

"His treatment of Africa is so sympathetic, affectionate and knowing." —Diane Johnson

"An immense book in every way - powerful, thoughtful, suspenseful, angry, and yet at the same time compassionate... wonderfully ambitious... An astonishing achievement." —John Gardner