Surrender

Jennifer Acker is author of the debut novel The Limits of the World, a fiction honoree for the Massachusetts Book Award. Her memoir “Fatigue” is an Amazon bestseller, and her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Oprah Daily, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, and  The Yale Review, among other places. Acker has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is founder and editor in chief of The Common. At Amherst College, she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and LitFest. She lives in western Massachusetts and Portland, Maine.

"In this literary novel, Lucy Richard trades her successful public relations career in New York for rural Massachusetts and dairy goats. After moving home to help save her father’s farm, she begins to struggle as her husband’s health declines and her lack of agricultural experience shines through. During these hardships, she finds comfort in her old friend, Sandy. However, their relationship quickly transcends beyond their platonic childhood bond."—The Boston Globe "Jennifer Acker’s splendid new novel Surrender provides what I crave from all stories: vividly drawn characters worth spending time with, a richly rendered place for them to inhabit, and the kinds of impossible choices that the real world too often offers all of us.—Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and the North Bath “Fool” novels."A bildungsroman of middle age. . . .Come for the human drama, stay for the goatish antics, or vice versa, in this bighearted tale of paradise forged.”—Kirkus Reviews"A love story unlike any you’ve read before, Surrender weaves together a mid-life queer awakening, a marriage in which aging becomes a tragic third, and a determined woman’s passion for her farm. The stakes are high at every turn, and I couldn’t stop turning pages to find out how our heroine would survive her surmounting stresses. This immersive novel teems with story and heart, and these characters  — both the humans and the goats —felt so real I missed them when I was done reading. Book clubs will love pairing this with a spread of chèvre."—Amy Shearn, award-winning author of Animal Instinct"I loved this glorious and immensely affecting portrait of a farmer's life, in which her devotion to her partner, community, and land confronts the challenges of commerce and aging. Surrender is a novel with a beating heart."—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning"Mirroring the rural New England landscape, Acker creates stark beauty in placing the extremes of life side-by-side: hardship by ease, comfort by pain, destruction by growth, new by old -- leaving us with a deeply compelling narrative and a finely etched portrait of a person finding her way. Acker's astounding clarity and ambition reaches from the complexity of making impossible decisions to the specific hardships and miracles of farming. It's a timeless book, of timeless struggles and timeless hope."—Ben Shattuck, author of The History of Sound