Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Helen Phillips author of The Need published in July by Simon and Schuster.

The Need is Helen’s fifth book, preceded by her children’s book Here Where The Sunbeams are Green, And Yet They Were Happy, The Beautiful Bureaucrat and Some Possible Solutions

Each of which have received various awards. She has also received and it is my favorite award ever—-The Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. On my fabulist bucket list.

Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, NYT, Tin House and many other publications.

The Need is a scary book. It is a funny book, it is a sad book, a tragic book, an heroic book and a book that is really hard to put down.

Do we have an unreliable narrator? I don’t know. Do we have a parallel universe? Beats me. Do we have two matching pennies? I can’t say. Do we like someone or another? But when a book asks you these questions and you can’t answer them, you know someone is on to something.

The Need starts out being something then morphs into something else. funnels, tunnels and as it does our questions begin to rise as do the protagonists.

And our protagonists are two sides of the same coin.

It is a book I will not soon forget maybe with a beatific dream every once in a while with the odd, and I mean odd, nightmare thrown in for good measure.

With that welcome Helen and thanks so much for joining us today.