Trompe l'Oeil: A Novel - Softcover

Nancy Reisman's debut novel, The First Desire, was a New York Times Notable Book and a recipient of the Goldberg Award from the Foundation for Jewish Culture. Her story collection, House Fires, won the Iowa Award for Short Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Tin House, Glimmer Train, the Yale Review, SubTropics, Michigan Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Five Points, Narrative, The Best American Short Stories (2001), and The O'Henry Award Stories (2005). Reisman has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Commission on the Arts, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She teaches at Vanderbilt University and lives in Nashville, TN.

“Genuinely satisfying, heart-shaking novels combine an absolute narrative authority with an apparently effortless style. You question nothing, savor every phrase and nuance, live willingly within their pages from the first word to the last.... 'Trompe L'Oeil' is one such book... There's a bright elasticity to Reisman's prose that only adds to [the] sense of possibility.... Rendered here, you feel, in startling and almost painterly form is life itself ... This novel doesn't just 'trompe' the 'oeil,' it reinvents it.”
- New York Times Book Review

“[W]ith shades of The Ice Storm and Revolutionary Road, Reisman offers a poignant portrait of a family undergoing a gradual, permanent transformation.”
- Publishers Weekly

“An eloquent exploration, from several perspectives, of one family’s life following unimaginable loss.”
- Booklist

“A realistic and gorgeously written story...”
- Library Journal

“In Trompe l'Oeil Nancy Reisman has created something amazing and mysterious: a portrait of a family that is also a portrait of how that family lives in the aftermath of grief. With wonderful skill and intelligence she shows us the Murphys over more than two decades as both parents and children finally step into their own lives. Their journey, the portraits of their journey, are deepened by Reisman's vivid sense of place and framed by her exquisite descriptions of paintings. This is a beautiful and deeply satisfying novel.”
- Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

“Nancy Reisman's mesmerizing Trompe l'Oeil is itself a magic trick. A dead child resists all erasure, while the most substantial-seeming family dissolves. Houses vanish when one's back is turned. Carefully charting the contours of absence, in prose as wise as it is beautiful, Reisman shows us that loss is a presence, another way to trick the eye ― and the heart.”
- Susan Choi, author of My Education

“What I have always admired about Nancy Reisman's writing is how absolutely gorgeous it is, and in Trompe l'Oeil her writing astonishes me even more. She writes about the weight of loss with beauty and honesty and grace. Simply a beautiful novel.”―”
- Ann Hood, author of An Italian Wife

“Trompe l'Oeil is perfect for book clubs because it offers so much fodder for discussion: How do we define 'fault'? When does a house change from being a home to being a trap? Is it inevitable that children born after the death of a sibling will be considered mere replacements for the one lost? Nancy Reisman, in this gentle, tragic novel, makes the reader feel as one with the Murphy family―living, grieving, falling apart―their trajectory inevitable. Or is it?”
- Georgia Court, Bookstore 1 Sarasota