Failure to Thrive

Author: Meghan Lamb

Publisher: Apocalypse Party (2021)

"Meghan Lamb's debut novel is a marvel. It's an indelible portrait of a nearly forgotten place, full of stunted lives and desperate hopes, decaying homes and fading memories, ghostly presences brought vividly to life. It's a timely exploration of the failures that seep into our lives like slow leaks and the systems that intensify them. It's a haunted landscape made luminous by Lamb's exquisite prose."

–Jeff Jackson

"Failure to Thrive captures slow collapse like nothing else I've read. It is packed with heartbreakingly acute observation, and yet it is uncrowded and spacious, with a gauzy, hallucinatory quality. Both expansive and economical, it does more with the form of the novel than most books will ever attempt. It's a gem glittering in the dark."

–Lindsay Lerman

"Meghan Lamb is such an exquisite, comprehensively intelligent, dreamy writer. Failure to Thrive exudes utmost pleasure and a defying ache from every dot of its ink, like the sun."

–Dennis Cooper