Sorrow and Bliss

“SORROW AND BLISS is a brilliantly faceted and extremely funny book about depression that engulfed me in the way I'm always hoping to be to be engulfed by novels. While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realised that I wanted to send it to everyone I know." ANN PATCHETT

“Completely brilliant. I loved it. I think every girl and woman should read it.” GILLIAN ANDERSON

“Meg Mason writes about the slow bleed of life-long depression with candour, humour and stark precision. SORROW AND BLISS is about what happens when your illness pushes everyone away - leaving you with only the sorest parts of yourself for company. It will, as the title suggests, shatter your heart, before mending it with infinite love. I've never read anything like it and will be pressing it into the hands of every reader I know.” PANDORA SYKES

“The most wonderful, heartbreakingly gorgeous novel of the year.” ELIZABETH DAY

“Witty and affecting.” DAVID NICHOLLS

“Supremely accomplished, breathtakingly funny and sad.” SOPHIE DAHL

”One of the many triumphs of the journalist Meg Mason’s second novel is that it is both fantastically dark and almost unbearably funny, so funny that you often have to put it down for a bit and laugh, out loud, sometimes to the point of tears. Then just as you’re laughing the hardest, Mason breezily fires off another little arrow that hits its target with such accuracy that you’re left reeling.” INDIA KNIGHT, THE SUNDAY TIMES

“Meg Mason has achieved something remarkable with her debut novel — Sorrow and Bliss is a raucously funny, beautifully written, emotion-bashing book about love, family and life’s curveballs that leaves you, satisfyingly, with what feels like wisdom forged in fire.” THE TIMES

“In Meg Mason’s almost eerily accomplished SORROW AND BLISS, the narrator Martha has suffered from mental illness since her teens. Yet, without ever playing down her pain, the result is often disconcertingly funny.” THE SPECTATOR

“SORROW AND BLISS is a modern love story that’s funny and dark, sharp and tender, hopeful and hard to put down. It has a brooding Sally Rooney vibe (but explores a slightly older and more mature slice of life) with exceptional inner monologue and palpable chemistry among the characters.” GOOP

“Mason pulls off something extraordinary in this huge-hearted novel, alchemising an unbearable anguish into something tender and hilarious and redemptive and wise, without ever undermining its gravity or diminishing its pain…It is impossible to read this novel and not be moved. It is also impossible not to laugh out loud.” THE GUARDIAN

“A truly comic novel about love and the despair of depression. It’s a rare and beautiful thing when an author can break your heart with humour; it’s also the quality I admire most in a writer.” THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Deeply moving but also darkly funny, Mason has created the sort of story that you savour the last pages of and long for once it's over” ESQUIRE

“The BELL JAR but hilarious. Bloody bleak but it’s also bloody witty” THE GRAHAM NORTON BOOKCLUB

“You know that book that only comes along every so often, that seems to unite everyone who has read it in a sort of delirious fervour? SORROW AND BLISS is that book. It’s utterly compelling and darkly funny: the book you have to read this summer.” EVENING STANDARD

“This is a story of mental illness reflected through the prism of an uproarious, big-hearted family comedy. It is fiercely intelligent and absolutely sublime. Like Julian Barnes, sublime.” THE IRISH INDEPENDENT

“A devastating and sharply funny love story” THE OBSERVER

“How can something this tender be this dark? How can a book this funny be so sad? Meg Mason pulls off an extraordinary feat - this is a novel that is darkly funny and unsparing of its targets, but also gentle and humane. The bone-dry voice of the narrator captures you on the first page and sweeps you along like a fast-moving current. Once you open it, cancel your plans. You won’t be putting it down.” THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

“It is an incredibly funny novel, and one that’s enlivened, often, by a madcap energy. Yet it still manages to be sensitive and heartfelt, and to offer a nuanced portrayal of what it means to try to make amends and change, even when that involves ‘start[ing] again from nothing.’” THE GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA

“This is one of the best novels about marriage that I have read, and that is a large field…This is also one of the best novels about mental illness I have read…I am adding it to my list of the best novels of 2020, alongside Andrew O’Hagan’s MAYFLIES, Sofie Laguna’s INFINITE SPLENDOURS and Douglas Stuart’s SHUGGIE BAIN, which won the Booker Prize.” THE AUSTRALIAN

“Evocative and hopeful, this book changes our perception of break-ups and interpersonal relationships.” BOOK RIOT

“Mason's bleakly comic [US] debut examines with pitiless clarity the impact of the narrator's mental illness on her closest relationships…Mason brings the reader into a deep understanding of Martha's experience without either condescending to her or letting her off too easily. While we as readers have the luxury of finding her observations funnier than she does, we're not so far distanced from her that we can't appreciate both her strengths and her weaknesses. An astute depiction of life on the psychic edge.” KIRKUS

“SORROW AND BLISS is a book you’ll want to devour in one sitting. Meg Mason has written an adult coming-of-age novel, told with force, breathlessness and a confessional style that makes you feel as if you’re sharing intimacies with a close friend. Mason’s writing has been compared to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s for good reason. Martha has a Fleabag-ian wit and obsessive self-reflection, the humour sitting alongside the despair.” THE SATURDAY PAPER

“‘I seem to find it more difficult to be alive than other people,’ says Martha, the protagonist of Mason’s extraordinary third book. Martha’s marriage is falling apart, and the novel journeys back through her early life and relationship with her family to reveal how she got to this point. Intensely sad at times, this book is also laugh-out-loud funny, and full of keen observations and lines you’ll want to underline and read aloud to everyone around you.” BROADSHEET

”[It] belongs to a lineage of intelligent, witty and inventive novels that interrogate the problem of whether selfhood can survive motherhood, including Jenny Offill’s DEPT. OF SPECULATION and Sheila Heti’s MOTHERHOOD. This all sounds incredibly bleak, but Martha’s sharpness is acerbically funny and compellingly direct and worthy of the frequent comparisons to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s FLEABAG and Ottessa Moshfegh’s works.” MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL

“SORROW AND BLISS weaves together the everyday with moments of profound sadness, all with razor-sharp wit and a canny dark sense of humour. Circling the breakdown of Martha and Patrick’s marriage, this sharp yet tender novel follows Martha’s retracing of the past to manage a path through her depression. Mason examines the connections between family and selfhood, and her cast of characters are all filled with flaws, contradictions and incredible depth. Acutely perceptive and full of tenderness, Sorrow and Bliss is being compared to Fleabag, Sally Rooney and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and similarly explores sensitive topics with a brilliantly droll tone which will have you chuckling as you turn the pages.” SYDNEY WRITERS FESTIVAL

“It is shockingly good. Martha humbles you, and by proxy so does Mason. You quickly understand that this is a writer who has hit her straps. More than that: what you realise, by the end, is that this is a book that was missing. A game-changer. You’re delighted that it’s here at last, and baffled that it took so long, and you hope that it leaches, a teeny bit, into books that come after. Also, it is extremely, exquisitely funny.” THE SPINOFF, NZ

“This is a story that will settle in the hearts and guts of anyone whose life has been touched by the devastation of not knowing exactly what is wrong, but hoping against hope that there is some way to fix it.” THE SPINOFF, NZ

“Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, to whose work this book will inevitably (but fairly) be compared, Meg Mason has an innate understanding of the comic power of sadness and how humour can be used to mask one’s reality….SORROW AND BLISS shines as a piece of fiction that makes explicit all the joys and afflictions of 21st-century life” BOOKTOPIA

“This is a romance, true, but a real one. It’s modern love up against the confusing, sad aches of mental illness, with all its highs, lows, humour and misery. Comparisons to Sally Rooney will be made, but Mason’s writing is less self-conscious than Rooney’s, and perhaps more mature. Her character work is outstanding, and poignant - the hairline fractures, contradictions and nuances of the middle-class family dynamic are painstakingly rendered with moving familiarity and black humour, resulting in a combination as devastating and sharply witty as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.” BOOKSELLER + PUBLISHER

“Exploring the multifaceted hardships of mental illness and the frustrating inaccuracy of diagnoses, medications, and treatments, SORROW AND BLISS is darkly comic and deeply heartfelt. Much like the narrator of ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE Martha's voice is acerbic, witty, and raw. Fans of Marian Keyes should put this on their to-read lists.” BOOKLIST

“Razor-sharp exploration of mental health and identity. Hilarious and heartbreaking.” COSMOPOLITAN

“Rarely have the excoriating effects of mental illness been articulated quite so beautifully – as heartbreaking as it’s funny.” RED MAGAZINE

“SORROW AND BLISS is a thing of beauty. Astute observations on marriage, motherhood, family, and mental illness are threaded through a story that is by turns devastating and restorative. Every sentence rings true. I will be telling everyone I love to read this book.” SARA COLLINS, author of THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON

“A sharply observed, darkly hilarious and merciless portrait of a thoroughly messed-up family. Patrick Melrose meets Fleabag. Brilliant.” CLARE CHAMBERS, author of SMALL PLEASURES

"Sharp yet humane, and jaw-droppingly funny, this is the kind of novel you will want to press into the hands of everyone you know. Mason has an extraordinary talent for dialogue and character, and her understanding of how much poignancy a reader can take is profound. A masterclass on family, damage and the bonds of love: as soon as I finished it, I started again.” JESSIE BURTON, author of THE MINIATURIST

“A triumph. A brutal, hilarious, compassionate triumph.” ALISON BELL, writer and creator of THE LET DOWN (ABC)