Improvement

'Improvement is a major work of literature.' - Nick Hornby, The BelieverReyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn't perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three-month stint in prison, their bond grows tighter. Kiki, now settled in New York after a journey that took her to Turkey and around the world, admires her niece's spirit but worries that she always picks the wrong man. Little does she know that the otherwise honourable Boyd is pulling Reyna into a scheme which violates his probation. When Reyna ultimately decides to remove herself for the sake of her four-year-old child, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them. A novel that examines conviction, connection and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki's beloved Turkish rugs and as colourful as the tattoos decorating Reyna's body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us. The Boston Globe says of Joan Silber 'No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power.' Improvement is Silber's most shining achievement yet.

A novel of richness and wisdom and huge pleasure, [Improvement] daisychains several related narratives into a rich and surprising whole...Silber's superb handling of time - that Alice Munro tribute isn't wide of the mark - draws the disparate lives into a unity, and makes this compressed novel feel mysteriously capacious., Silber is the genuine article, a writer of such precision, intelligence and insight that she makes you gasp...The characterisation is fantastic and the dialogue pitch-perfect., Improvement is a major work of literature....I love [Silber's] prose even more than I love her unconventional narrative approach. The first story, written in the first person, seems to me like the perfect lesson in voice, and anyone trying to write or to teach writing should read it. Reyna, the narrator, is funny, shrewd, laconic, fatalistic, something of a fuckup, and refreshingly unbookish; there isn't a single line that lets the reader down, or that allows you to suspect even for a second that this person isn't real., Silber brings the skills of a short story writer to her novels, giving her characters enough space to breathe within the confines of the larger story, and every so often one will come across a jewel of a sentence that begs to be underlined or committed to memory.

Joan Silber is the author of eight books of fiction. Her previous book, Fools (2013), was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Other works include The Size of the World (2008), Ideas of Heaven (2004), Lucky Us (2001), In My Other Life (2000), In the City (1987) and Household Words (1980), winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is also the author of The Art of Time in Fiction (2009). In 2018 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.