Barrow’s Point

Winner of the 2015 Gival Press Novel Award

To be released in fall 2016.

Nominations:
2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize
2016 National Book Award for Fiction

Advance Praise:
“There’s a serial killer on the loose, and in the fishbowl setting of Robert Schirmer’s Barrow’s Point, ‘shadow selves’ of fear overtake the town’s residents. No one can be trusted. Schirmer peoples his remarkable book with characters conflicted by their own discordant passions and prejudices. The writing is sensuous, the plot unpredictable, and the upshot brilliantly captures the unease of our times.”
—Ann Cummins, author of Red Ant House and Yellowcake

 Living With Strangers – NYU Press, 1991

“This is a collection of individual stories that, when read as a whole, create a singular vision: that of a lonely, stark, even eerie world in which the central characters find themselves, in one way or the other, outsiders. The evocation of this world is partially accomplished with a uniform physical setting — most of these stories take place in rural Minnesota, a setting portrayed as isolated, lonely, and claustrophobic. But this external world also parallels the internal spirit of the characters. All these stories deal in some way with yearning. The characters desire something that seems out of their reach, ungraspable either because of circumstances, the will of others imposed upon them, or even their own doubts and fears, turned inward against themselves. The characters here are dreamers who struggle anyway, seeking love, freedom, and the dignity in human or spiritual connection that will confirm their place in a world that moves relentlessly forward, indifferent to their longings.”