The Everlasting Story of Nory

Our supreme fabulist of the ordinary now turns his attention on a 9-year-old American girl and produces a novel as enchantingly idiosyncratic as any he has written. Nory Winslow wants to be a dentist or a designer of pop-up books. She likes telling stories and inventing dolls. She has nightmares about teeth, which may explain her career choice. She is going to school in England, where she is mocked for her accent and her friendship with an unpopular girl, and she has made it through the year without crying.

Nicholson Baker follows Nory as she interacts with her parents and peers, thinks about God and death-watch beetles, and dreams of cows with pointed teeth. In this precocious child he gives us a heroine as canny and as whimsical as Lewis Carroll's Alice and evokes childhood in all its luminous weirdness.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published four novels--The Mezzanine (1988), Room Temperature (1990), Vox (1992), and The Fermata (1994)--and two works of nonfiction, U and I (1991) and The Size of Thoughts (1996). He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two children.