Named a Best Book of 2020 by Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, Vulture, The New Yorker, and Kirkus Grappling with motherhood, economic anxiety, rage, and the limits of language, Want is a fiercely personal novel that vibrates with anger, insight, and love. Elizabeth is tired. Years after coming to New York to try to build a life, she has found herself with two kids, a husband, two jobs, a PhD―and now they’re filing for bankruptcy. As she tries to balance her dream and the impossibility of striving toward it while her work and home lives feel poised to fall apart, she wakes at ungodly hours to run miles by the icy river, struggling to quiet her thoughts. When she reaches out to Sasha, her long-lost childhood friend, it feels almost harmless―one of those innocuous ruptures that exist online, in texts. But her timing is uncanny. Sasha is facing a crisis, too, and perhaps after years apart, their shared moments of crux can bring them back into each other’s lives. In Want , Lynn Steger Strong explores the subtle violences enacted on a certain type of woman when she dares to want things―and all the various violences in which she implicates herself as she tries to survive. The New York Times "16 Books to Watch For in July" The Washington Post "Ten Books to Read in July" TIME Magazine "45 New Books You Need To Read This Summer" Vulture "29 Books We Can't Wait To Read This Summer" NY Post "30 Best Summer Books to Help You Escape 2020" Poets and Writers "Galley Crush" The Millions "Notable Book" The Today Show "5 Books to Read if You Loved Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan" "Want is so sharp about economic fragility and just how close to the edge people are ― even with the seeming safeguard of middle-class jobs and good educations. The narrator's voice is the great draw here: It's tough, smart, semi-reliable, low-level angry. We're mostly cooped up in her head throughout much of the novel, which is a fine and rich place to be." ― NPR, " Want Captures The Precariousness of America's Middle Class" "Lynn Steger Strong’s Want is a defining novel of our age of left-behind families. . . .as if Anne Helen Peterson’s viral burnout article and John Steinbeck’s oeuvre had a baby. . . an ideal sample of how to produce fiction that is timely and timeless.” ― Vulture , " Want Is The Summer Book I Couldn't Put Down" “To readers it might feel like prophecy ― or the surfacing of something invisible. Want, like our current crisis, exposes a system on the verge of collapse. . . .but it's also powerful proof that novels, and novelists, can still speak undeniable truths." ― The L.A. Times "The summer’s best novel about the bankrupt American Dream" “Moving… As a narrator, Elizabeth is smart and funny and literary to the marrow. The books she inhales for sustenance have turned out to be a great addition to my own pandemic pile. (Thank you, Ms. Strong.)” ― The New York Times "Through anger and humor, the book tackles the broken American dream and explores the subtle acts of violence that women face as they try to achieve anything of substance." ―The Today Show "A devouring read." ― Entertainment Weekly, "20 New Books to Read in July" "A brisk first-person saga with a plot that reads both like every millennial Brooklynite’s worst nightmare and a 200-page argument for the necessity of democratic socialism. . . . Want is a highly-anticipated tome, with praise from Emma Cline, Leslie Jamison, Rumaan Alam, Jenny Offill ― a literary A-list of blurbs" ― Entertainment Weekly, Want 's Lynn Steger Strong on writing her own privilege" "The physical grind of economic precarity is palpable in the writing’s rough texture, its bluntness. . . . The Brooklyn novel is a necessarily provincial thing, but Want often feels like something larger, a portrayal of generational dispossession, or of the American Dream moving in reverse." ― The Wall Street Journal "Brilliant" ― New York Magazine "Strong writes of [a] friendship in exacting detail, illustrating the ferocity with which women can care for one another. . . . Elizabeth’s anxious, raw voice ties these threads together, coalescing into a story about the price women pay for craving what’s just out of reach." ― TIME Magazine "Want situates itself under your skin with a raw understanding of lost faith fused with the ache for bottomless love and acceptance. Capturing the chaos of this modern moment, Strong strips away at the imbalance of advantages that ultimately injure us all and the collisions that never cease. Yet, in this stunning novel, she never loses sight of the irrepressible desire to love, connect and forgive one another." ― The Observer "It will be some time before we see literature directly inspired by the pandemic, but as it turns out, some artists anticipated the culture we’ve been living through that the pandemic has exacerbated. . . .This is not the deprivation of John S