Epilogue: A Memoir - Hardcover

Will Boast was born in England and grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin. He won the Iowa Short Fiction Award for his story collection, Power Ballads, and the Rome Prize. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best New American Voices, and elsewhere. He divides his time between Chicago and Brooklyn, New York.

“Wise, charming and deeply moving.”
- Leslie Jamison, The New York Times Book Review

“It is during these unspoken moments that the author deftly captures the fleeting intimacy between father and son....The power of Epilogue comes in Boast’s brave and candid recounting of his losses ― and how this accumulated grief reshapes the author and his beliefs of what can make up a family.”
- S. Kirk Walsh, San Francisco Chronicle

“Boast, an accomplished fiction writer and essayist, has composed a moving, elegantly contrapuntal narrative about coming to terms with his families―the one he lost, and the one that welcomed him with open arms.”
- Ben Dickinson, Elle

“A beautiful and finely crafted memoir, one that recalls in its very construction the vortexes and whorls of grief, the ways that memory is a living thing and time marches forward...It is a truly rare feat for a book to both break your heart and make you wish it wouldn’t end: Epilogue does both. Boast has shown us life as it really is: beautiful, strange, cruel, surprising, and rarely so honestly explored.”
- Nellie Hermann, Los Angeles Review of Books

“This remarkable memoir is written with extraordinary care, intelligence, and honesty. Though the material is powerful to begin with, what makes it work so well is its authorial voice: a rare combination of rawness and restraint, probing and delicacy, self-laceration and tenderness toward others. In short, it's fully alive.”
- Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head

“Don't let the title of Will Boast’s magnificent memoir fool you―Epilogue is about beginnings as much as endings, discovering as much as losing family. It's honest, heartbreaking, gorgeously written, and hands down the most moving book I've read so far this year.”
- Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“A brave, brilliant, masterfully crafted story about an ordinary family's extraordinary collision of tragedies and secrets. Will Boast's efforts to write his family’s epilogue―to forge a space for his own life through understanding theirs―make for one of the most moving and transformative reading experiences I've had. I won't ever forget it.”
- Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints

“Riveting, soulful, and courageously told... Never has a story of loss been so full of life.”
- Maggie Shipstead, author of the national bestseller Seating Arrangements

“The story of Epilogue would be compelling enough: a young man loses one family and discovers another. In Will Boast's expert hands, it becomes a plangent and penetrating meditation on grief, the weight of secrets, and the redemptive power of family. Clear-eyed, unsentimental, and heartbreaking, this book is a gift to its reader.”
- Justin St Germain, author of Son of a Gun: A Memoir

“Elegiac and unsentimental, Epilogue is a moving meditation on the enduring mysteries of family, the surprising possibilities of loss, and the deep resilience of an individual. With piercing clarity and wisdom, Will Boast reveals the unexpected within the unthinkable.”
- Jennifer duBois, author of Cartwheel