“Evocative, lyrical prose and a keen eye for unexpected detail hold the reader spellbound through this odd, poignant tale of a sensitive man’s quest to understand himself and his loved ones by cracking the code of their lives’ elusive symbolism.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Philip Graham has long been, with his remarkable short stories, one of the most original and ravishing voices in American fiction. Now he has brought his prodigious skills to a novel and—how rare this is—he has produced work of equal brilliance in both forms. How to Read an Unwritten Language is a book full of passion and poetry and profound insight into one of the great and eternal themes of art, the formation of self. I come away from the novel seeing the things of the everyday world quite differently.”
—Robert Olen Butler