The Nobodies Album - ISBNLookup.com

Publishers Weekly

Parkhurst (The Dogs of Babel) returns with the story of Octavia Frost: widow, successful novelist, and estranged mother of Milo, lead singer of an up-and-coming band. Milo and Octavia haven't spoken in almost four years, but their separation ends when Octavia learns (from the Times Square news crawl) that Milo has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. In short order, Octavia travels to the West Coast, determined to find out who really killed Bettina Moffett. Octavia's quest is peppered with short excerpts from her novels—in original and revised form—though the bits and scraps sometimes come off as filler instead of metafictional excursions into stories Octavia revises for publication and for her own purposes. (Not insignificantly, Milo's band is called Pareidolia, after the human compulsion to see, for instance, the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast.) Parkhurst's voice sucks the reader in immediately—the gift of a real storyteller—but the mixed genre structure will turn off as many readers as it works for, and the mystery plot is thinner than it should be. (June)

Art Taylor

A number of ambitious and winning novels have been written about novelists themselves, from Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin to Ian McEwan's Atonement and Carol Shields's Unless. Add to the list now D.C. author Carolyn Parkhurst's The Nobodies Album. Not just a book about a novelist in action, it's also a meditation on writing itself and on the curious intersections between the imagined world and the real one.
—The Washington Post

Liesl Schillinger

In The Nobodies Album, with a light but sure hand, Carolyn Parkhurst joins together four disparate literary forms: the family drama, the short story, the philosophical essay on language and, yes, the whodunit. Her weave is smooth, a vigorous hybrid of the old-fashioned, the modern and the postmodern. She reminds us what an act of will and imagination it has always taken for a writer to convert nobodies into somebodies in any genre, whether at the desk or in the world.
—The New York Times

Library Journal

Parkhurst's (www.carolynparkhurst.com) third novel, following Lost and Found (2006), is a literary murder mystery about a best-selling author whose latest endeavor re-imagines all the final chapters of her previous books. As she delivers this new creation to her editor, she learns her estranged son has been arrested on suspicion of murder. The story alternates between her reunion with her son and both her original and revised story endings. Actress Kimberly Farr skillfully renders the protagonists and provides enough variation in the other numerous characters to give narrative clarity. Although the murder mystery aspect is only a small component of this tale, there is enough here to appeal to mystery lovers. Appreciators of experimental fiction, however, are most likely to enjoy. ["Like an indie band with crossover potential, Parkhurst's Album delivers the goods," read the review of the Doubleday hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 6/10/10.—Ed.]—J. Sara Paulk, Wythe-Grayson Regional Lib., Independence, VA