The Center of Everything

New York: Hyperion, 2003. First Edition. Hardcover. New/New. Signed first edition. New.

From the publisher: "Set in Kerrville, Kansas, The Center of Everything is told by Evelyn Bucknow, an endearing character with a wholly refreshing way of looking at the world. Living with her single mother in a small apartment, Evelyn Bucknow is a young girl wincing her way through adolescence. With a voice that is as charming as it is recognizable, Evelyn immerses the reader in the dramas of an entire community. The people of Kerrville, stuck at once in the middle of nowhere but also at the center of everything, are the source from which Moriarty draws on universal dilemmas of love and belief to render a story that grows in emotional intensity until it lifts the reader to heights achieved only by the finest of fiction."

About the author, from her own website: Laura Moriarty earned a degree in social work before returning for her M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Kansas. She was the recipient of the George Bennett Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and is now a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kansas. She lives in Lawrence, Kansas, and is at work on her next novel."

The Center of Everything is her first novel. Since then she has written The Rest of Her Life (2007), While I'm Falling (2009), The Chaperone (2012), and, most recently the young adult novel American Heart (2018).

"The author makes fine use of simple, small-town events, refracting and re-examining them through Evelyn's changing perceptions....a warm, beguiling book full of hard-won wisdom." Janet Maslin, the New York Times, June 30, 2003.

ABEDESC
The Center of Everything is told through the voice of young Evelyn Bucknow, a young girl who lives with her single mother in a small apartment in the small town of Kerrville, Kansas. But Evelyn doesn't tell her own story so much as she tells the story of Kerrville. Author Laura Moriarty is from Kansas and still lives there. She earned a degree in social work before becoming a writer, and has recently started writing young adult fiction-she knows what she's talking about in The Center of Everything. Janet Maselin, in the New York Times, said of this book when it came out, "The author makes fine use of simple, small-town events, refracting and re-examining them through Evelyn's changing perceptions....a warm, beguiling book full of hard-won wisdom." Our copy is signed and brand new, in pristine condition. Library of Congress description: 291 p.; 24 cm. Printed on alkaline paper.