We Shall Not All Sleep: A Novel

Estep Nagy

Exciting debut showcases a strong new voice: With his beautifully spare style, Nagy has hit upon a setting and group of characters that could very well become the focus of a series of books.

Arresting.
In this fine-tuned, observant debut, the Hillsingers and the Quicks share a complicated family-line rivalry that just won't quit . . . A chilling portrait of privilege and secrets.
Estep Nagy's razor-sharp debut, We Shall Not All Sleep, brings us Jim Hillsinger, a Cold War-era high WASP with a wandering wife and a CIA career that's just gone up in smoke.
This is an amazing book. It's rare to encounter such mature insight into as interesting and complex characters as these.
Nagy deftly captures the way a political atmosphere of mistrust and manipulation can color even the most private interactions.
Seven Island serves less as an antidote for urban drudgery than as a theater for psychological warfare . . . Nagy's novel roguishly equates international brinkmanship with interpersonal relations, an analogy that underscores the ways in which both can abjure immutable truths.
[We Shall Not All Sleep] has C.I.A. secrets, intergenerational family drama, WASP warfare, and all sorts of other twists and turns that will keep your eyes glued to the pages. A summer read if there ever was one, this is one of those literary beach books you won't be able to put down.
Poetic yet tightly plotted, this is a gorgeously written debut which will appeal to fans of literary fiction.
Written for a new era of uncertainty, in which there's much to believe in and little to depend on.
Maine families tangle themselves into a sailor's knot of Waspy kerfuffles in Estep Nagy's We Shall Not All Sleep.
An unusual and compelling debut . . . a surprising delight. Nagy mixes narrative modes and tones (and generations) nimbly; it's rare to see suspense and literary lyricism woven together so well.
Nagy neatly juggles his many characters, allowing suspense to develop naturally and working in thought-provoking variations on the themes of betrayal and survival.
An engrossing, multi-layered story of loss, betrayal and privilege, played out against an unforgiving setting.
Transcending the mere narrative of an inter-family rivalry, We Shall Not All Sleep uses the developed nuance of its prose to create a psychological investigation into the choices and behaviors of its protagonists, mirrored by the complexity of a decade on the brink of bringing about everlasting change.
An absolutely invigorating fiction debut . . . Nagy writes it with such a clean, graceful prose line that he transforms it all into a fascinating multi-part psychological investigation.
Nagy writes fluently of the island's old-world WASP milieu, with its privileges, rituals, and sometimes surprising credos.
From the first sentence, We Shall Not All Sleep whisks us off to the arcane world of the Quicks and the Hillsingers on Seven Island, a place alive with elaborate, arbitrary traditions and political and emotional tensions. Effortlessly interweaving intergenerational stories and cold war intrigue, the book explores the crossing of thresholds - between hearts and life stages, between islands and ideologies - and what such transitions cost. Torn between their desires as individuals and their duties to their wider group, Nagy's subtly drawn characters struggle to negotiate the gap between visible and invisible rules; between information and true understanding. Written with an exquisitely light touch, the result is an utterly compelling novel from a brilliant new voice.