Reviews

"The Barber's Wife is about as close to perfect as novels get. Tanya Nichols is able to achieve many different effects without appearing to try very hard, and therein lies much of the beauty of this achingly fine and wondrous creation. She made these characters come alive, and she made me care deeply about their fate. She's a wise and sure-handed writer. I loved her book."-Steve Yarbrough "The Barber's Wife is a compelling story of love and loyalty set in rural America, but above all, it's a powerful and moving portrait of one woman's courage and competence in response to the acute human need she observes around her. A small town surgical nurse in 1930s Oklahoma, Mayme Holloway is gritty, smart, independent, and she is sometimes unexpectedly noble. She challenges traditional moral conventions and lives by her own evolving and authentic values-often at great risk. Tanya Nichols is a master storyteller, and this is a fabulous book."-Corrinne Clegg Hales "In sparkling prose, Tanya Nichols has opened up a moment in history, reinventing several months in the life of notorious but beloved bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd through the lens of the fictional Mayme Holloway. The genius of this novel is the way Nichols keeps Floyd in the background, never borrowing significance and proving, as Yann Martel asserts," fiction is closer to the full experience of life." Mayme is wonderfully drawn, vibrantly alive on the page, smart, passionate, flawed. The supporting cast is equally vivid, and the dusty, quietly threatening atmosphere of 1932 in northeastern Oklahoma accurately and subtly rendered. This is a graceful and compelling novel. That it is a first novel is enormously impressive."-Liza Wieland