"From the first glorious sentence to its last astounding word, Robert Hill's When All is Said and Done is a treasure. The sophisticated wit and luxurious language of this brilliant novel weave a story of one family's complex heart and history and their journey through 1950s/60s suburban Connecticut and all its prejudices. Read this American saga and weep." - Tom Spanbauer

"I really liked this book. I read it in a single sitting-the writing is wonderful, rich, evocative and truly unique. Hill's novel is strong for all that it does say, and all that it leaves to the reader's imagination. There's something poetic in the best of ways about the way that the lines and language unfold. This book reminds me of Cheever and Yates and a young Rick Moody." - AM Homes

"When All Is Said and Done is a fresh, high-velocity cry from the heart, showing that love is the rose and the thorn at once, and that Mr. Robert Hill has taken a running start into what they used to call the literary scene." - Ron Carlson

"What's extraordinary about Robert Hill's lyrical and lovely debut novel, When All Is Said and Done, is that he finds the poetry in ordinary, everyday life - marriage, family, work, pain, beauty, awe." - Helen Schulman

"I think it's very lively and quirky and effervescent with beautiful, unpredictable language and fresh details." - Edmund White

The Literary Arts/Oregon Literary Fellowship awarded When All Is Said and Done with the Walt Morey Fellowship for fiction as a work in progress.

Booklist | March 1, 2006

"There's nothing like an exhilarating first novel to rejuvenate a literature lover's faith in fiction's power to throw open the doors of perception. Hill has written a breakneck, wisecracking, tenderhearted, socially revealing portrait of an unusual early 1960s American marriage. Myrmy is a stylish and successful Madison Avenue advertising copywriter, wife, and mother. Her hunky and loving husband, Dan, is a war veteran turned tie salesman. Overriding anti-Semitic obstacles, Myrmy has moved her family out of the city into a suburb, where she remains a dynamo while Dan is plagued by strange maladies. Could his troubles be the result of a little radiation experiment conducted by the military? It's hard to find time for a diagnosis with three young boys to care for. Every aspect of this agile, intoxicating, hilarious, and poignant novel is compelling, but what elevates it is the exuberant language. Hill writes with velocity, rhythm, and wit, conveying a world of subtle emotions and social nuance in brilliantly syncopated inner monologues and staccato dialogue, creating a bravura and resounding performance. - Donna Seaman

Publisher's Weekly | March (Read the Starred Review)

"A tightly crafted, emotionally resonant debut novel set in the 1950s and '60s skims the upwardly mobile lives of an unconventional Jewish family on the far edges of the New York suburbs. When Madison Avenue advertising executive Myrmy moves her growing family out of Brooklyn, she is directed away from the Waspy Charmington, Conn., to the less restrictive Eastly-for "people like you," the realtor advises. Thus begins an ambivalent life on Pink Cloud Lane for prefeminist working mother Myrmy, her steady GI husband, Dan (whose lungs were damaged in army radiation experiments), three sons hard-won after several miscarriages, and the indispensable nanny in nurse's whites. Hectic household rhythms and run-ins with thegoyishe neighbors Ed and Mary Fence and their six daughters provide some comic relief until illness disrupts married life for Myrmy and Dan, who alternately narrate the novel. Myrmy weathers promotions and pneumonia, while Dan suffers from a burned-out thyroid and suddenly dies. With evocative, freewheeling prose ("the run-on sentences that were her married life"), Hill, an ad copywriter himself, nimbly salvages one family's striving from an era of grasping and consumerism."

Graywolf Press released When All Is Said and Done on March 21, 2006! Click here to purchase the book!