Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
$27.98$27.98
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: AULE
$9.45$9.45
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: SoBoho
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
Rules for Visiting: A Novel Hardcover – May 14, 2019
Purchase options and add-ons
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: O Magazine * Good Housekeeping * Real Simple * Vulture * Chicago Tribune
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE SUMMER BY: “The Today Show” * “Good Morning America” * Wall Street Journal * San Francisco Chronicle * Southern Living
An INDIE NEXT LIST Pick
Shortlisted for the 2020 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize
Long-listed for the 2020 Tournament of Books
"Fun, hilarious, and extremely touching."—NPR
A beautifully observed and deeply funny novel of May Attaway, a university gardener who sets out on an odyssey to reconnect with four old friends over the course of a year.
At forty, May Attaway is more at home with plants than people. Over the years, she's turned inward, finding pleasure in language, her work as a gardener, and keeping her neighbors at arm's length while keenly observing them. But when she is unexpectedly granted some leave from her job, May is inspired to reconnect with four once close friends. She knows they will never have a proper reunion, so she goes, one-by-one, to each of them. A student of the classics, May considers her journey a female Odyssey. What might the world have had if, instead of waiting, Penelope had set out on an adventure of her own?
RULES FOR VISITING is a woman's exploration of friendship in the digital age. Deeply alert to the nobility and the ridiculousness of ordinary people, May savors the pleasures along the way—afternoon ice cream with a long-lost friend, surprise postcards from an unexpected crush, and a moving encounter with ancient beauty. Though she gets a taste of viral online fame, May chooses to bypass her friends' perfectly cultivated online lives to instead meet them in their messy analog ones.
Ultimately, May learns that a best friend is someone who knows your story—and she inspires us all to master the art of visiting.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Press
- Publication dateMay 14, 2019
- Dimensions6 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-100525559221
- ISBN-13978-0525559221
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
- Perhaps a best friend is someone who . . . holds the story of your life in mind. Sometimes in music a melodic line is so beautiful the notes feel inevitable; you can anticipate the next note through a long rest. Maybe that is friendship. A best friend holds your story in mind so notes don’t have to be repeated.Highlighted by 659 Kindle readers
- “Global warming,” he said. “I think they’re trying to save us.”Highlighted by 546 Kindle readers
- The Japanese have a word for the calming, restorative power of simply being in a forest or among trees: shinrin-yoku, forest bathing.Highlighted by 515 Kindle readers
From the Publisher
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
“This beautiful novel tackles loneliness in the digital age and the lost art of visiting. Introvert May Attaway is granted some unexpected time off as a university gardener and is inspired to reconnect with four once-close friends. May chooses to bypass her friends' perfectly cultivated online lives to instead meet them IRL. Gives a whole new meaning to Instagram vs. reality.”—Good Morning America
"This spirit-warming saga, an antidote to the uncivil, is a novel to be read again and again, whenever one needs a reminder to seize the day…Treat yourself to Jessica Francis Kane's novel Rules for Visiting, an elixir in book form about a quest for friendship that could have been written by Jane Austen’s great great-great-granddaughter.”—O Magazine
“Crackles with wit”—The New York Times
“Full of witticisms and broader life lessons, Rules for Visiting will stay with readers.”—Elizabeth Sile, Real Simple
“Kane’s understated meditation on loneliness in the digital age [is] just the right kind of narrative, an antidote for our distracted days.”—Hillary Kelly, Vulture
"A witty, sometimes melancholy and altogether lovely meditation on love, loss, friendship—and botany.”—Wall Street Journal
"Fun, hilarious, and extremely touching... its coming out right around Mother's Day is no coincidence... I loved May as a character... she doesn't need me to like her, though. She has her plants, her father, some new or revitalized friendships, and her own sharp and witty mind to keep her company. She is no Grendel — only a deeply alive human."—Ilana Masad, NPR
“At 40, May Attaway, the protagonist, finds herself alone and feeling profoundly disconnected from her life and from herself. When she receives an unexpected gift of time off, she seizes the opportunity to visit four old friends. May is smart, funny and more than a little prickly. Readers will love her and find her story both moving and reassuring.”—Michael Barnard, San Francisco Chronicle
"Quietly powerful"—The Chicago Tribune
“Impeccably written and surprisingly moving...May’s journey is lovely and deeply affecting.”—Publisher's Weekly
“Kane’s delightful tale celebrates friendship, family, love, joy in the ordinary, finding peace, and connecting with those around us. Highly recommended for fans of humorous, touching stories about friendship and self-discovery.”—Library Journal, starred review
“In the age of Facebook, the true nature of friendship can seem muddled . . . [May] voices the doubts and dreams of any woman who has questioned what it means to be a true friend. Rich in subtexts and lush imagery, Kane’s novel is a sure bet for lively book discussions.”—Booklist, starred review
"Engagingly cleareyed prose about a winningly eccentric heroine in love with trees and literature."—Kirkus Reviews
“Jessica Francis Kane's precise and moving Rules For Visiting is an altogether new sort of friendship novel, one about friendships stretched to their limits over time and space, the sort of friendships so many of us count as our closest. Kane's gift for describing beauty and loneliness, the real stuff of life, is unparalleled.”—Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers
“An engaging and compassionate portrait of how a root-bound, constricted life can begin to bloom. Drawing inspiration from mythic sources, Kane explores the power of friendship and of our connection to the natural world. Her descriptions of plants are transporting.”—Madeline Miller, author of Circe
“There’s a wonderful richness here in every sentence—a lyric and ambling directness that immediately feels like visiting with an old friend, and applied to an ordinariness that soon becomes sublime with topics that go anywhere and then always back to the cure this narrator is in search of: a remedy for her hesitation with life, that feels like a much larger disappointment, almost global. The novel, you soon realize, is perhaps the remedy she searches for, and you almost wish you could give it to her. But take this home with you, as this, this is for us.”—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“Jessica Francis Kane’s novel will win your heart: Single, melancholy, resourceful, May Attaway, the 40 year old protagonist of Rules for Visiting, sets out on travels to rekindle her oldest friendships, and thereby to find herself. Wry, witty, ultimately uplifting, this gem of a novel celebrates the gifts in our ordinary lives.”—Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl
“In one motion Rules for Visiting can break your heart and lift your spirits up to the sky. Funny, warm, thoughtful, there's a little Olive Kitteridge in this gem of a novel. I did not want this book to end. It is the perfect gift for friends or people you just have to visit (everyone I know is getting this!)”—Julie Klam, author of The Stars in Our Eyes: The Famous, the Infamous, and Why We Care Way Too Much About Them
“An elegant and deeply moving meditation on friendship, family, and life on earth. Rules for Visiting is a wonderful novel.”—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
"Jessica Francis Kane has written a vivid, elegant and masterfully constructed novel about friendship and neighbors and our own personal odysseys. This is a deeply smart book, one I had difficulty putting down. There is real wisdom in these pages.”—Stuart Nadler, author of The Inseparables
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Press; First Edition (May 14, 2019)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525559221
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525559221
- Item Weight : 14.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #435,622 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,227 in Women's Friendship Fiction
- #11,223 in Contemporary Women Fiction
- #23,321 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
What happens upon each visit, with two childhood friends, a college friend, and another from graduate school, turns into a frolic for us as readers. It is pure amusement. Yes, May does some serious reflecting. And, we want that. But she is so funny that you cannot help but fall in love with her and her quirkiness. Her rules for visiting are no-nonsense. She has it down to a science. And, it’s no surprise, after all, she is a master at her job tending to the university’s vast garden so why shouldn’t she be able to tend to her friends just as well. Just as you wouldn’t want to over water or pay too much attention to one flower over another, the same rules apply.
Clever, amusing, sweet, and kind. Follow May as she disrupts the stillness of the digital world by entering the physical one with her own oomph. All the while comparing epic works of literature to her own journey. I didn’t want this book to end. Except I couldn’t wait for May to come back home.