“If you don’t belong to a book club, Darin Strauss’s bitter and BRILLIANT new novel, More Than It Hurts You, is REASON ENOUGH TO START ONE.”
— The Washington Post
(Lead Review)

“In 'Chang & Eng,' Strauss BRILLIANTLY humanized a traveling curiosity.... Although 'More Than it Hurts You' is set in present day Long Island.... this is no retreat into safer territory and time. What he's after, in fact, is VERY AMBITIOUS: to show what strangers we can be, even to those we think we know best." – The New York Times

“The PERFECT SUMMER BOOK: a big, meaty page-turner flavored with insight, humor and a large helping of human drama. LIKE UPDIKE…. Strauss PULLS OFF THE RARE FEAT of combining CHARACTERS WHO QUIVER WITH LIFE with enough SUSPENSE TO KEEP YOU PANTING UNTIL THE END.”
– The St. Louis Post- Dispatch (Lead Review)

“Thoroughly ENGAGING and SUSPENSEFUL”
– People Magazine (Lead Review)

“Strauss certainly tells an EXCITING, CUNNINGLY-PLOTTED story, but his most telling ‘special effect’ is an UNERRING INTELLIGENCE about family, race and suburbia… More Than It Hurts You ABOUNDS WITH TAUTLY OBSERVANT METAPHOR [and] Strauss is a SEAMLESS weaver of telling observation and fast-moving plot. He's SHREWD about the ways in which modern media can be manipulated to invade the sanctity of domestic life.
He's even more KNOWING about the push and pull within the home itself. IS THERE A BETTER DEFINITION of family, after all, than the one he ascribes to [his protagonist] ‘worked-at forgiveness’?”
– Newsday (Lead Review)

“RIVETING”
– Publisher’s Weekly
(Lead Review)

“This book is harrowing, hurtling, heartbreaking and—more than anything— devastatingly accurate. Darin Strauss (a novelist whose talents sometime seem limitless to me) has created characters whose complexities and dark motivations—though they are always hidden from each other, and even sometimes from themselves — are never hidden from their author. This is a brilliant, sharp, suspenseful novel, impossible to turn your gaze from.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

“Darin Strauss has written a novel that is — suture by suture, idea for idea — peerlessly brilliant. Here is a supreme, mature novelist at the height of his powers. Take me to the hospital. My jaw has dropped.”
—Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

“A prize-winning, front-cover-of-the-Times-Book-Review type of story that’s sure to be one of the few novels of this era to be remembered in thirty years — and not just because it’s going to be made into a movie. Destined to be the most important popular novel since The Corrections.”
—Kevin Baker, author of Paradise Alley

“That rare thing: a blockbuster with a can’t-miss commercial hook — and it’s also a great story, a cross between Bonfire of the Vanities and The Lovely Bones.”
—David Lipsky, author of Absolutely American

“At turns funny and disturbing, unsparing in its insights yet generous with understanding. More Than It Hurts You is a relentlessly rewarding piece of art.”
—Colson Whitehead, author of Apex Hides the Hurt and John Henry Days