Rules for Visiting | Granta

  • Published: 06/06/2019
  • ISBN: 9781783784660
  • Granta Books
  • 304 pages

Rules for Visiting

Jessica Francis Kane

‘Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward’

May is at a crossroads. Although her career as a gardener for the university is flourishing, the rest of her life has narrowed to a parched routine. Her father is elderly, her brother estranged, and she keeps her neighbours at arm’s length. The missing element, she realises, might be friendship. As May sets off on a journey to visit four neglected friends one-by-one, she holds herself (and them) to humorously high standards, while at home she begins to confront the pain of her past and imagine for herself a different kind of future. May’s quest becomes an exploration of the power, and perhaps limits, of modern friendship.

An engaging and compassionate portrait of how a root-bound, constricted life can begin to bloom. Drawing inspiration from mythic sources, Kane explores the power of friendship and of our connection to the natural world. Her descriptions of plants are transporting

Madeline Miller, author, Circe

An elegant and deeply moving meditation on friendship, family, and life on earth. Rules for Visiting is a wonderful novel

Emily St. John Mandel, author, Station Eleven

Jessica Francis Kane's precise and moving Rules For Visiting is an altogether new sort of friendship novel, one about friendships stretched to their limits over time and space, the sort of friendships so many of us count as our closest. Kane's gift for describing beauty and loneliness, the real stuff of life, is unparalleled

Emma Straub, author, The Vacationers

The Author

Jessica Francis Kane is the author of Rules for Visiting and The Report (both published by Granta). She is also the author of two story collections, Bending Heaven (Chatto & Windus, 2003) and This Close (Graywolf, 2013). She lives in New York City.

More about the author →

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‘On 8 January 2018, I noticed a large bunch of purple balloons in a tree near my apartment building.’

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Rules for Visiting

Jessica Francis Kane

‘It wasn’t until the end of dinner, when my aunt started clearing and my grandmother demanded another bottle of wine, that I began to understand.’