A Huffington Post Book Club Suggestion An O: The Oprah Magazine Fall Pick A LitHub Book You
Should Read This September One of The Millions' Most Anticipated for 2016 2017 Ohioana Book
Award Winner in Fiction Marisa Silver s beguiling new novel Little Nothing is a powerful
exploration of the relationship between our changeable bodies and our just as malleable
identities Silver s storytelling skills are finely matched to her themes meditative passages
bloom with life. Matt Bell The New York Times Book Review A stunning provocative new novel
from New York Times bestselling author Marisa Silver Little Nothing is the story of a girl
scorned for her physical deformity whose passion and salvation lie in her otherworldly ability
to transform herself and the world around her. In an unnamed country at the beginning of the
last century a child called Pavla is born to peasant parents. Her arrival fervently
anticipated and conceived in part by gypsy tonics and archaic prescriptions stuns her parents
and brings outrage and scorn from her community. Pavla has been born a dwarf beautiful in face
but as the years pass she grows no farther than the edge of her crib. When her parents turn to
the treatments of a local charlatan his terrifying cure opens the floodgates of persecution
for Pavla. Little Nothing unfolds across a lifetime of unimaginable magical transformation in
and out of human form as an outcast girl becomes a hunted woman whose ultimate survival
depends on the most startling transfiguration of them all. Woven throughout is the journey of
Danilo the young man entranced by Pavla obsessed only with protecting her. Part allegory
about the shifting nature of being part subversive fairy tale of love in all its uncanny
guises Little Nothing spans the beginning of a new century the disintegration of ancient
superstitions and the adoption of industry and invention. With a cast of remarkable characters
a wholly original story and extraordinary page-turning prose Marisa Silver delivers a novel
of sheer electricity.
