Eleven Hours - Softcover

PAMELA ERENS’s second novel, The Virgins, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and was named a Best Book of 2013 by the New Yorker, the New Republic, Library Journal, and Salon. The novel was a finalist for the John Gardner Book Award for the best book of fiction published in 2013. Pamela’s debut novel, The Understory, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in publications such as Elle, Vogue, the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Millions.

“Erens . . . [creates] one of the most realistic and harrowing portrayals of birth you are likely to encounter in fiction. She has also written an indelible portrait of two women coming to terms with desire, fear, crushing losses and fragile joys that have carved their lives, and who knows what it means to fight every hour, every minute, to take another breath.”
- New York Times Book Review

“Exhilarating novel . . .The writing is candid without being sensational, detailed without being clinical. This admirable novel reminds us that even when childbirth is overseen by caring professionals in state-of-the-art facilities, it still arrives on waves of blood.”
- Wall Street Journal

“I loved Eleven Hours. In this gorgeous, haunting, slender novel, Pamela Erens creates an intimacy that is all-encompassing.”
- Roxane Gay, author of BAD FEMINIST

“Pamela Erens achieves the extraordinary in her third novel, Eleven Hours: a visceral story about an intensely painful experience that manages to be an intense pleasure to read.”
- Boston Globe

“Childbirth, this uniquely female form of heroism, is rarely documented in our literature, and I’ve never seen it rendered with the extraordinary insight, urgency, and potency of Eleven Hours. Every dilation and contraction of feeling is recorded, and Erens evokes the layered experience of living in a body― its tides of memory, sensation, and emotion―like no other writer I know.”
- Karen Russell, author of VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE

“Quietly, without the fanfare she is due, Pamela Erens has become one of the finest novelists of the twenty-first century, and Eleven Hours is another confirmation.”
- Kyle Minor, author of PRAYING DRUNK

“With exhilarating speed the wonderful Pamela Erens describes the stories of two women as one gives birth to her first child and the other tries to contain her fears around motherhood. Miraculously, in these few beautiful pages, we learn everything we need to know about these characters and their lives. A brilliantly suspenseful and moving novel.”
- Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

“ Powerful―aesthetically and viscerally.”
- Kirkus, STARRED

“Written with incredible clarity, the third novel from Erens (The Virgins) is a wonder, shifting between two protagonists with ease to tell a deeply personal narrative of childbirth, complete with tension, horror, and deep mature emotion. This novel does not sentimentalize the delivery of a child, but rather examines the surprise -- mental and physical -- that accompanies it. Labor stories are as old as time, but Erens's novel feels incredibly fresh and vivid. An outstanding accomplishment.”
- Publishers Weekly, STARRED & Pick of the Week

“The book is fierce and vivid in its depiction of the exhaustion of the spirit and the rending of the flesh during childbirth. So much so, that it makes that boy adventure aboard Herman Melville's Pequod almost seem like a Carnival cruise. . . Erens never flinches here and in this incisive novel about birth, she bears witness to its beauty and brutality.”
- NPR Fresh Air