Praise for Wah!  

Cynthia Rogerson doesn't spare the horses of intimacy; she tells it like it is and she tells it all. 'Wah' is witty, rich in revelation, and elegantly written. Her style owes something to Richard Brautigan - she's from California after all - and this only increases my delight in reading it. I'm really enjoying it

  • Chris Stewart

 WAH! is as poignant as it is hilarious, and that is saying something. Everyone with a mother should read this book.

  • Louisa Young

 I really loved the book and wanted to finish it. Very impressive, and a joy to read. I'm going to pass it on to my wife immediately. A memoir about joy in the shadow of grief, WAH! is both moving and funny, with a wonderfully light touch - completely charming.

  • Tim Dowling

 Wah! seems at first to be a tragicomic account of a dying mother who won't die. But gradually, with Rogerson's distinctive fusion of empathetic warmth and unrestrained frankness, it encompasses the entire scope of life from childhood to old age, and all the different kinds of love.

  • Michel Faber

 Wah! is witty, compassionate, playful, scarily honest and emotionally accurate. It does that rare, liberating thing, being funny about pain – I think of The Roches – without diminishing either the humour or the hurt. It’s a head-on book about drawn-out loss of a parent to old age and dementia. More widely, it is about how we lose our own life as we live it, how we kid and console ourselves. It is a personal memoir with universal resonance, for this is about a pain which will come to us all if we’re lucky. The writing is deceptively casual, fashioned with a great deal of concealed Art and deftness. And it is adventurous in its alternation of personal memoir with short stories written out of that life.  It works. For me, Wah! quietly goes deeper than most memoirs, touching us in our own life, and lingers with me long after closing the book.

I have much enjoyed all Cynthia Rogerson’s novels since ‘Upstairs in the tent’, but Wah! may be her most lasting achievement.

  • Andrew Greig

 I've read and enjoyed Wah, which cheerfully and intelligently subverts most more conventional memoirs I've read. How do you write about your mother’s love without sentimentality or her marriage without simplicity? I don’t know, but novelist Cynthia Rogerson does - along with how to write a memoir as  open-hearted and engaging as this. 

  • David Robinson


A rich, lyrical text that will show the tears at the heart of things.

  • Richard Holloway

 I love this story. So fascinating and so much of its time. It made me feel nostalgic for certain music and conversations. And a more free life. That's not possible now, but it was how you felt then. As if only conversation and music mattered.

  • Isla Dewar

 Cynthia Rogerson deserves to be far better known than she is for her sharp-witted, warm and perceptive fiction. In this scintillating memoir, covering six decades and moving between California and the Scottish Highlands, she delivers another wonderful book. As her mother, afflicted with dementia, fades slowly from life Cynthia recalls key moments from a conventional childhood, wilder adolescence and breakaway early twenties. These episodes and her older self’s commentary on them are laugh-aloud funny, poignant, rude, wicked, shallow and profound - sometimes all on the same page. WAH! is a textbook lesson in how not to learn the lessons of life, but whoever said that’s what life is for? I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in ages.

  • James Robertson

 Cynthia Rogerson’s memoir, Wah! is a marvellous read.  It’s searingly, almost wincingly, honest yet at the same time teases the reader by embroidering over the line between memoir and fiction.  Rogerson is especially good at portraying the tenderness and confusion of pain and loss, the complex tangle of feelings we have for our loved ones, and her wisecracks skewer even the bleakest moments.

  • Lesley Glaister

 A selfie of a tearaway with a real writer in control of the chaos. A wonderful and courageous book. 

  •  Bernard MacLaverty

 

Praise for Wait for Me Jack


Most moving novel of the year (2017) for me was Wait for Me Jack by Addison Jones (formerly Cynthia Rogerson), a vivid account of a lifetime’s marriage, narrated largely in reverse. It’s about love and its slippages, mismatches, compromises, making up and making do. It convinced me as few novels do that this is how we live.

-       Andrew Greig in The Sunday Herald Dec 2nd

Wait for me Jack is a painfully honest excavation of a long marriage.  Despite the betrayals, the rows, the ennui of daily domesticity, this is a proper love story - that is the miracle Jones has wrought.  This novel is a lesson, not in how to find love, but how to make love last.

-    Tim Pears


Cynthia Rogerson’s latest novel (written under the name of Addison Jones) Wait for me, Jack is a poignant story of a marriage, told with tenderness, acuity and wit. Chronicling the marriage backward through the years, Rogerson’s apparently casual, but deft storytelling draws her reader to the beguilingly ‘natural’, but quietly startling truth that Milly and Jack in old age – the young Billie and Jacko – were quite different people when their relationship began. Rogerson moves seamlessly between the characters’ inner and outer lives to reveal the tensions between husband and wife and the paradoxes of marriage: the companionship and loneliness, attraction and repulsion, joy and sadness, contentment and frustration.  Time and place are characters too; Rogerson’s post-war California exerts as subtle but exact an influence as Anne Tyler’s Baltimore. The result is a wise, brilliantly observed and often very funny exploration of the attritions and enrichments of coupledom, and of love.

-    Morag Joss


This is a frank, earthy and occasionally drily amusing of marriage….Jones addresses the question: How do you make love last, even when it feels like hatred.

- The Herald - February 2017

Uplifting and astute, this book should save marriage

- The Sunday Times  (A Times Best Read choice and a Top Summer Read)



If I Touched the Earth       Black & White 2012

Nothing less than Scotland’s very own Anne Tyler.

-          Alan Bissett 

Cynthia Rogerson’s intelligent and patient novel follows hard on the heels of Sue Peebles equally excellent prizewinning novel The Death of Lomond Friel.

-          The Scotsman

Handled with wit, tenderness and sureness of language. Original and accomplished.

-          Anne Donovan




I Love You, Goodbye         Black & White 2011

(Shortlisted for Scottish Novel of the Year 2011; translated into five languages.)

Rogerson is a master of fresh and sparky writing. A spirited and inventive novel by a Scots writer of considerable gifts.

-          The Guardian

 Captured me from the first...a hugely accomplished novel.

-          Louise Welsh

 Rogerson’s prose is impressive and deceptively powerful, making this a subtle and insightful read.

-          The Big Issue

A great read...it’s sexy, funny, full of laconic and tender insights into the wonderful mess that people make of their relationships, and into that elusive prey we call love.

-          Tim Pears

 A good writer, who thinks properly about the world.

-          The Scotsman

 What is love?  Love is the relationship that will develop between you and this quirky, wise, and fascinating novel. Your heart will pang with recognition again & again as Rogerson explores the foibles that make relationships so beautiful and so heartbreaking.  An engaging, insightful and witty novel that resonates with a profound emotional intelligence.

-          Kevin MacNeil

 Her style is easy and graceful, but her spiky humour takes most of the honours in this tale of kiss and don’t tell.

-          Scottish Review of Books


Stepping Out & Other Stories      Salt 2010

(including winning story - V.S.Pritchett Prize 2009)

 Cynthia Rogerson is a new writer of great clarity and humanity - definitely one to watch.

A.L. Kennedy

 Cynthia Rogerson tells a compelling and involving story.

- Jackie Kay

 Cynthia writes with delicate poignancy and wit. Her stories, sometimes funny, sometimes slightly surreal, sometimes unbearably sad, unravel seamlessly and with a sense of place. Her characters are always utterly real.

Isla Dewar

 A Dangerous Place is an intensely felt and movingly rendered story.  A worthy prize winner.

Bernard MacLaverty

 Cynthia Rogerson is a writer of tremendous heart and intellect and manages to combine the two without trace of sentimentality. Like Alice Munro she writes with startling authenticity and is a North American writer with Scottish sensibilities. Her humour is sly, her characterisation superb, she winkles out and makes heroic the average nerd in all of us. She is a courteous rebel and currently one of Scotland’s best writers.

Laura Marney


Cynthia Rogerson is a writer who brilliantly melds warm insight with sure eloquence, great characterisation with tight dialogue, terrific depths with vital subtleties. The overall effect is a literature that moves through beauty, humour and mystery towards a better understanding of what makes us human.

Kevin MacNeil


The story is told with a measured calm, almost a distance and certainly a lack of  sentimentality.  Yet it is,  when she decides to take us close, just a breath away from  becoming intimate, moving, sad.  This is some feat for a writer, something we all want to achieve.  A beautiful short story.

Tim Pears

 

 Love Letters from my Death Bed      Two Ravens 2007

(nominated for the Saltire Prize and the Sundial SAC Prize 2009)


Witty, wise and on occasion laugh aloud funny.  A tonic for all those concerned with living more fully while we can.

Andrew Greig

 A delightfully funny and often deeply touching book.

Scottish Review of Books

 Cynthia Rogerson’s wonderfully eccentric Love Letters from my Death bed is achingly funny and deeply touching. 

Laura Hird (choosing Love Letters as her favourite book of 2007, for Scotland on Sunday)

 Zany, wise and deliciously funny, it’s immediately engrossing, totally engaging and written with style and verve.

Janet Paisley (choosing Love Letters as her favourite book of 2007 for Sunday Herald)


Upstairs in the Tent      Headline Review  2000

 

Her writing has a lovely spirit to it; an appealing mixture of the spiky and the warm.

Michel Faber

 A real page turner, witty and touching and true. I read it with delight.

Andrew Greig

 A story told with warmth and confidence, which avoids sentimentality.

Herald

 Rogerson has an ability to inhabit all her characters convincingly. She sketches them with just the right amount of detail, chooses just the right aspects to emphasize.

Scotland on Sunday

 A tale that shines with the warmth and surprise of a weepy penned by Maeve Bincy with added vignettes a la Crichton Smith.

The Scotsman

Rogerson is a fine observer of human quirks, revealing a generous understanding of what it means to be an individual.

Sunday Herald 


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