This is a gentle, generous portrait of a twentieth-century life that fired my imagination.  Each life in this novel, however seemingly ordinary, holds worlds of longing.

Wild Aster is an unsparing deep-dive of a novel that takes its time to tell one woman’s ordinary, extraordinary, defiant story. Anna Hogeland’s unorthodox portraits of motherhood, family, friendship, and mid-century womanhood are all fascinating and complicated in the best ways – fervent, complex, and, best of all, unexpected.

Wild Aster is that rare thing: a novel that marries the feeling of a timeless classic with a sharp, contemporary sensibility…Mae herself is a singular protagonist…I fell in love with her and with this beautiful, insightful book.

Spans decades of quiet tragedy and delivers one of the most satisfying endings I have read in a long time. Hogeland’s prose feels like a character in its own right, stoic and resolute, leaving space for readers to consider their own longing, loss, and repair.

Exquisitely written, Wild Aster charts the legacy of motherhood and the echoes of our choices. A shining novel that captures the beauty and bravery of ordinary life.

Anna Hogeland’s prose is clear water, lucid and drinkable. Her Mae Smith is a character as indelible as some fabulous ancestor, as intimately known as an admired friend.

these lived narratives overheard, whispered, written into novels—continue to show we have lives worth living, that women are viable human beings…these stories are crucial.

The Long Answer is a triumph of human portraiture, as subtle as it is seething…it is fascinating both on its surface and in its depths

An introspective, psychologically astute, and engaging debut, this novel delves into territory that is rarely explored in fiction. […] A startling meditation on grief and family and betrayal and the stories we tell about ourselves.