One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2020

"Tatiana Ryckman's second novel, The Ancestry of Objects, takes us deep into the labyrinth of eros and its manias. There is adultery, there is loneliness and abandonment, there is shame and longing, a family of ghosts, and there is a woman learning how to live and finally, how to love herself." -Micheline Marcom, author of The Brick House

"I've always loved Ryckman's fiction, but nothing in the idiosyncratic originality of her short stories prepared me for her stunning novel with its dark eroticism, its plunge into depths of loneliness, and its quest for paradoxical liberation. Her extraordinary narrator lives in a state of erasure but thinks as plural: the social self for whom everything is always "fine"; the guilty, sinful self as defined by the now-dead grandparents; the self who needs to be seen through the outside eye of the absent lover, the absent God; and most of all, the self who feels dead in daily life and alive when courting an exuberant annihilation. In reading this powerful and disturbing short novel, I found myself splitting as well, into the reader who could not put these pages down, and the reader who had to, in order to regain her equilibrium and catch her throttled breath." -Diane Lefer, award-winning author of California Transit, playwright, and activist

"'It is us-our fear and our shame and our pride-and no one else that haunts us, ' says the narrator (or narrators) of this harrowing, startling novel, told in the first person plural. From the moment I started reading, I felt the presence of T.R. Ryckman's unmistakable genius. You could compare it to Ben Marcus, Alexandra Kleeman, Brian Evanson or Carmen Machado, but really The Ancestry of Objects is in a category of its own." -Jess Row

"Ryckman writes with cool, tightly packed precision on the futile ways people try to fill the emptiness and absence of life with objects and religion and desperate acts. ... A hypnotizing, bleak account of the ways people trap themselves in their own minds." -Kirkus Reviews

"Readers of lyrical, genre-bending fiction will be spellbound." -Publishers Weekly

"A dizzying story of girl meets boy, meets her all-encompassing desire, meets her equally fervent wish to end her life, meets the mysteries and ghosts that have circled her whole life, meets . . . so much more. The girl in question, an unnamed narrator, has wells of need and want at her core, for which the boy, David, is an unwitting receptacle. Told in fragments, and memories, and various voices, The Ancestry of Objects whirls the reader through the narrator's many selves as she attempts to reckon with the voids that we all contend with." -Julia Hass, Lit Hub Editorial Fellow

"The Ancestry of Objects is both urgent and lyrical, braiding together themes of consent and control, family ghosts, and epic tragedy. A young woman starts an affair with a married man she meets at a restaurant. Within that same week, she can't stop thinking about ending her own life. Tatiana Ryckman's darkly erotic new novel questions what it means to survive, and the ways in which we split our identities to do