Ron Charles[Emily, Alone] quietly shuffles in where few authors have dared to go. And it's so humane and so finely executed that I hope it finds those sensitive readers who will appreciate it…Through short, crisp chapters we follow Emily's well-ordered, dignified life, frequently challenged by calamities and disappointments large and small, all gently captured in O'Nan's precise, unadorned prose…Emily, Alone makes the perfect demonstration of O'Nan's humanizing vision.
—The Washington Post
Joanna Smith Rakoff…O'Nan's best novel yet…[is] heartbreaking stuff…and yet the novel's brilliance lies just as much in O'Nan's innate comic timing, which often stems from Emily's self-imposed isolation from, and disgust with, the modern world…If O'Nan's earlier novels were influenced by Poe, the spectre of Henry James hovers delicately above Emily's Grafton Street home, insinuating itself into O'Nan's spiraling, exact sentences and the beautiful, subtle symbolism that permeates the novel.
