The World to Come

Bursting with wicked humor and driven by an incomparable understanding of what it means to be human, The World to Come is the inimitable work of “the most ambitious story writer in America” (The Daily Beast).

Shepard traverses both borders and centuries, seamlessly inhabiting a multitude of disparate men and women, and giving voice to visionaries, pioneers, and secret misfits—from nineteenth-century explorers departing on one of the Arctic’s most nightmarish expeditions to twentieth-century American military wives maintaining hope at home. Shepard’s characters confront everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to colossal catastrophes, battling natural forces, the hazards of new technology, and their own implacable shortcomings.

"[Shepard] has a knack for compressing a novel’s worth of life into 30 or 40 pages.” —The Boston Globe

“An astonishingly powerful demonstration of fiction’s capacity to transport us across time and space… An absolute pleasure to read.”  — The Christian Science Monitor 

“If you’re attracted to historical storytelling powered by masterful, exact voices, Jim Shepard’s The World to Come will awe and inspire.”  — Elle 

Shepard’s language is athletic, supple, and avoids flourish or pomp, and can bring an epic sweep to the most intimate corners of our fleeting, electrically charged time on Earth.”  — Independent (Dublin)

“A writer who defies categorization… The stories are meditations on the past as prologue, on seeing the world to come (as the title has it) in the world that has been… Shepard is a stylist whose fictional expansiveness underscores his singularity.”   — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 

“Harrowing… Shepard allows his imagination to run wild throughout The World to Come… One of the great pleasures of reading Shepard’s book is never knowing from one story to the next where the author is going to allow his roving attention to settle.”  —The Globe and Mail (Toronto) 

“A masterful, profoundly involving collection… Exceptionally powerful tales of courageous responsibility and criminal indifference.”  — Booklist (starred review) 

"The title story left me weeping.”  — The San Francisco Chronicle 

“Shepard’s stories come bearing enough unimpeachable detail to ensure they never sink into the mush of a half-baked world… His approach gives the individual stories heft and his collections dizzying range.”   — New York Times Book Review 

Each story in The World to Come is its own sort of joy to read… No one is better at inhabiting a voice than Shepard.”   — Outside