In this marvelously funny, unsettling, subtle, and moving collection of stories the characters exist in the thick of everyday experience absent of epiphanies. The people are caught off-guard or cast adrift by personal impulses even while wide awake to their own imperfections. Each voice will win readers over completely and break hearts with each confused and conflicted decision that is made. Every story is beautifully controlled and provocatively alive to its own truth.

The 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist citation for People Like You:

"In plainspoken American speech, with great delicacy and wit, the nine stories in Margaret Malone's People Like You constantly beguile and surprise. With Chekhov they share both compassion and brevity; they share with Carver and Beattie a confidence in the unforced sentiment of unadorned prose; and in their matter-of-fact humor, which is often laugh-out-loud funny, they tap a long tradition of American humorists stretching from Mark Twain to Lorrie Moore. What sets them apart are Malone's protagonists: dark, troubled women unafraid to puncture the pieties or to confront the void. Three of these stories involve a beleaguered wife named Cheryl whose life gains real emotional heft despite the often absurd predicaments she finds herself in, predicaments that look and feel all too much like real life. That is the great pleasure here: these artful stories have the force of truth in every line."

(Judges Joshua Ferris, Alexandra Marshall, and Jay Parini)