Tender - Softcover

Belinda McKeon's debut novel, Solace, won the 2012 Faber Prize, was voted Irish Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her essays and journalism have been published in The Paris Review, the New York Times, the Guardian, and elsewhere. She has had plays produced in Dublin and New York, and is under commission to the Abbey Theatre. McKeon was a nominee for the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction post. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Rutgers University.

"Tender combines the urge to escape the ordinary of Brideshead Revisited with the tormented devotion of McEwan's Enduring Love. It is chilling, gorgeous, and profoundly insightful about the very human urge to wreck oneself on the shoals of a great ambition."--Matthew Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

"Tender rises above every other book on the shelf for its language alone; the beauty of each sentence will break your heart. But the story, full of the pleasures and terrors and betrayals of youth, will do that anyway. There is no way around it: you will weep. Spectacular."
―Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells


"Utterly exquisite, unflinchingly observed, Tender is the story of a specific obsessive love, but also the story of youth itself, the blinding needs of heart and body, the illusion that one can change reality to suit one's desires--just by wanting to enough. McKeon's intelligence and insight shine through every page, and the words themselves perform miracles of revelation as they dance from one sentence to the next."
―Robin Black, author of Life Drawing


"Tender is compelling and deeply affecting: McKeon's prose describes the calibrations of emotions wonderfully, and the novel is great on friendship, on art, on being young and in love... I read it in a day."
―Nick Laird, author of To a Fault


"A perceptive, unexpectedly moving novel about friendship and love and all the heart-stopping moments in between."
―Jenny Offill, bestselling author of Dept. of Speculation


"Richly nuanced and utterly absorbing."
―The Guardian


"Tender is the best Irish novel I've read since The Spinning Heart, a work rich with wisdom, truth and beauty. There are no gimmicks, no deliberately eccentric characters and no wildly overblown prose masquerading as poetry. Reading it, the novelist that came to mind time and again was Anne Tyler, one of the greatest storytellers alive, whose characters arrive on the page like human beings, things happen to them, they react to these things, and then life continues. I can scarcely think of higher praise than to say that Belinda McKeon could be our Anne Tyler. There is simply not a false note anywhere in Tender."
―John Boyne, The Irish Times


"McKeon is a superb and sophisticated writer, who captures the barely articulable feelings between young people on the brink of adulthood."
―Fiona Wilson, The Times (UK)


"Belinda McKeon writes like a dream, and Tender proves that she belongs among the most revered novelists working today."
―Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock


"McKeon...captures something essential about friendship, vulnerability, love, and longing. As it explores the push-pull of this achingly intimate, increasingly obsessive relationship-the way James and Catherine attract and repel each other as if they were two strong magnets turned this way and that-the story throbs with the tension between them.... McKeon regards the characters in her keenly wrought love story-for all their flaws and fragility-with insight, sensitivity, and a compassion that proves contagious."―Kirkus, Starred Review

"You'll feel immersed in the textured, nuanced exploration of the fraught emotional territory of relationships and the stress that time puts on them-and just might be able to relate."―Elle