S T R A W B E R R Y F I E L D S
“The writing in this novel is haunting. Plum uses the beauty of her prose to record indelibly the unbearable destruction of beauty we Americans are perpetrating through the history we are living. She has created a style that values what is being lost with the accuracy of inconsolability.” Peter Dimock
“Few American books have as truly global a perspective as Hilary Plum’s second novel, which ranges over remarkably disparate territories with exemplary economy of means, and holds together not only aesthetically but also as a vision for our times. As multi-vocal as it is constrained, Strawberry Fields balances the sensual with the cerebral, the human body in the world with the human imagination perceiving it therein. And in so doing it achieves the seemingly impossible virtue of being a political book without a hint of polemic.” Youssef Rakha
“In Strawberry Fields, Hilary Plum’s crew of journalists move like restless flies from one battlefield to another, demonstrating the struggle against (and implication with) the logic of late empire: how a contested truth splits into fragments, and cannot be made whole. But Plum knows how to assemble the shards so that we recognize in them the image of our own burning world, where the murder of five American veterans takes its rightful place in an international constellation of violence, recrimination, and environmental degradation. As Plum’s investigators burrow into text and memory, her scrupulous prose—full of mingled lyricism and irony—places her in the tradition of Danilo Kiš and Roberto Bolaño: writers who, despite the constant risk of despair, commit themselves to beating against the current of an ever-widening river of blood, fighting upstream to find the source.” Sam Allingham
“Strawberry Fields is the story that goes on behind the protests, the press releases, the police reports, the news clip of the nameless victim weeping. It claims nothing so naïve as the truth, but seeks instead the ever-expanding multiverse of truths—the truths that are laid bare by the fact of their subjects’ suffering and the ones that those of us on the other side of the newspaper or television screen experience only as we pointedly do not experience them. Hilary Plum is an unflinching skin, an unblinking eye, a brave and ardent voice speaking from the singular I to the great chaotic we that screams and bursts and blooms and starves all around her. This is a book that is hard to hold because it is about what, in our shared nature, we cannot contain. Our curiosity. Our cruelty. Our sorrow. Our love. The world that Plum relentlessly explores is our world. We cannot deny it. All its devastating beauty, all its impossible truths. We need this book—you and I—for a long time, this is what we have needed.” Sarah Blackman
Winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose
Fence Books
April 24, 2018
Publicity inquiries to Jeremy Wang-Iverson, jeremy [at] vestopr [dot] com
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Excerpt at the Fanzine
Interview on “The Sound of Applause,” Ideastream, Cleveland
Q&A with Andrea Lawlor at the Blog // Los Angeles Review of Books
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“In Hilary Plum’s Strawberry Fields, myriad memorable protagonists report on tragedies from hotspots around the world with vivid language… A bleak but well-rendered picture of global destruction. The novel moves through many of the major crises of the early twenty-first century… Plum used real reporters’ impressions of the crises that her fictional equivalents navigate. Her narrators are outside observers; her lyrical first-person writing is plausible as their work… The subject matter is universally dark, but also very realistic, making Strawberry Fields work as a thinly fictionalized version of global chaos.” —Jeff Fleischer, Foreword Reviews (May/June 2018)