“★ Restless and inquisitive, Barbara is acutely sensitive to time, irony, the zeitgeist, metaphorical dimensions of filmmaking and nuclear physics, and power dynamics personal and professional. Murphy’s atmospheric, Didionesque portrait of a creatively brilliant and cruelly underestimated ‘permanent outsider’ is exquisitely perceptive and lushly resonant.” — Donna Seaman, Booklist (Starred Review)

“Elegant . . . The prose, particularly the descriptions of acting and filmmaking, is exceptional. Readers will enjoy this atmospheric work.” —Publishers Weekly

“Barbara is an entrancing novel of contrapuntal virtuosity. Its time signatures—the present tense of cinema, the radioactive half-lives of geopolitics and memory, the ticking time-bomb by which a woman comes to know herself—reflect the twentieth century as we have never really known it . . . Uncannily alive, Barbara gets under your skin.” —Ariana Reines, author of ‘A Sand Book’

“Sensuous and sexy, vivid and tactile—Barbara is one of the most beautifully written novels I’ve read in a long time. In it, Joni Murphy expertly captures both the melancholic pains and the hedonistic pleasures of a life spent making art.” —Laura Adamczyk, author of ‘Island City’ and ‘Hardly Children’

“I suspect every reader would see something different in Barbara, which, for all its rich allusiveness, feels strikingly distinct.” — Marisa Grizenko, The Ex-Puritan

“This book is like a hologram—an image, an image, an image, pointing through inner and outer spaces, through time, to the silhouette of a woman who lived once, in three dimensions, and who will live on in every reader’s memory. Beautiful and radioactive and sly.” —Sean Michaels, author of ‘Do You Remember Being Born?’

“Barbara is an American girl with a black hole at her center, a maid smoking out a bathroom window, a vampiric film director, a perfect and suicidal mother, the patron saint of miners and bomb-makers. Moving an unmapped course through time and fictions, Joni Murphy’s Barbara opens dimensions behind the actor’s returning stare.” — Deragh Campbell

“Barbara examines the masks we assume and the lies we tell ourselves to muddle through life . . . Murphy’s even-keeled prose smooths Barbara’s recollections into one hypnotic narrative. Even though Barbara tells us there is no climax to her story, we read on, expecting an explosion.” — Grace Byron, BOMB

“Atmospheric and thoughtful.” — Sam Franzini, Our Culture

“Joni Murphy creates a complex, intimate portrait . . . Murphy’s prose is diary-like, inviting readers into Barbara’s captivating confidence. Complete with photographs of scenes and settings from the era, the first-person narrative explores identity, tragedy, and the interconnected personal and political hardships of Barbara’s life.” — Clara Newton, Shelf Awareness

“Under Murphy’s remarkably conversant eye, a bygone era of cinema, romance, travel and artistry comes to life in breathtaking detail . . . Incisive as it is captivating, Barbara captures what it meant to exist as a woman and artist during a specific moment in the twentieth century, in a world where life was a performance and performance was life.” — Emma Leokadia Walkiewicz, Girls on the Page