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[Cameron's] chief literary virtues are wit, charm, and lightness of touch, qualities infrequently found in contemporary American fiction . . . Cameron is above all a novelist of manners, building his effects from the drama and comedy of human relationships, working always on a small scale, so it has been tempting to treat his books as "minor." . . . Cameron specializes in emotional subtlety and unspoken desires — all the while hinting at an almost overwhelming disorder swirling beneath the placid surface . . . We may be slow to recognize Cameron as a twenty-first-centry American master because he has the sensibility of a twentieth-century British one. — Christopher R. Beha starred review Set in the English countryside in the aftermath of WWII, this quietly compelling sixth novel from Cameron (The Weekend) focuses on the story of the eponymous heroine, Coral, a nurse, sent to Hart House in 1950 to tend the dying Mrs. Hart. With great efficiency, Cameron introduces the other players: Mrs. Hart’s son, Maj. Clement Hart, an embittered veteran wounded in the war; his friend Robin Lofting; the brittle, disapproving housekeeper, Mrs. Prense. But after Mrs. Hart dies, and Major Hart proposes to Coral, this seemingly well-realized homage to the postwar British novel quickly turns almost gothic...The book is suffused with a lonely sadness and an aura of the surreal, and the many dramatic events in Coral’s life are entirely plausible thanks to Cameron’s skill as a storyteller. Best of the Month ... for Adults Beauty and loss suffuse Peter Cameron's atmospheric period novel, set in the English countryside in the 1950s. When she is hired to care for a dying woman at the woman's isolated home, a young nurse discovers that the secluded mansion is also inhabited by the dying woman's wounded-veteran son. Exploring themes of love and longing, Cameron's skillfully wrought tale lures readers into a somber, dreamlike world.
Despite its Rebecca-like beginning—a Mrs. Danvers stand-in, a murder mystery, and a withholding husband—the first love in this story is not the major's first wife. As the reasons for his repressed emotions unfold, we see how they have led to many of the misunderstandings and plot twists that follow. With its atmospheric Fifties setting and stylish writing, this is one of Cameron's finest novels. —Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. Cameron’s shimmering and expectant prose infuses this deceptively simple novel with an incandescent depth. When a spiritually bereft Coral Glynn arrives at Hart House in the gloomy north of England in 1950 to nurse the elderly Mrs. Hart, her ever-precarious situation as a servant/guest in the household is threatened by the unexpectedly quick death of her patient. Still, Coral is presented with the chance of a more comfortable life when Clement, the physically and emotionally damaged son of Mrs. Hart, proposes marriage. When Coral stumbles upon two children playing a gruesome and dangerous game in the primeval forest adjacent to Hart House, it confirms her initial misgivings. The decidedly somber and gothic tone of the narrative rings the perfect warning note as the reader begins to suspect that a standard fairy-tale ending is highly unlikely for a cast of lost souls forlornly muted by unrequited longings. — Margaret Flanagan 
...I was hooked. So hooked, that since then, I've actually bought copies and given them away to total strangers — it's a rather embarrassing practice, but that is how much I want to create a word-of-mouth movement that would rouse the world into recognizing the book's sheer excellence.
Jennifer Hubbard recommends Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You on NPR's website. To read her entire piece, please click here. 
Lorrie Moore reviews Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You in The New York Review of Books "Deliciously vital right from the start...Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a piece of vocal virtuosity and possibly Cameron's best book: it retains the lucid and unlabored prose of his previous ones but wastes less time; it may be his most successful novel on its own terms -- terms that are not as modest as they may initially seem...What Peter Cameron has done is written a sophisticated and adult book. Neither young adult literature, nor even really a coming-of-age story, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is most surprisingly of all the subtlest September 11 novel yet written. So accomplished is its subtlety that one is not even aware of this novel's true subject until three quarters of the way through, and then its mention...rises up out of the story's barely submerged anxiety and casts on the book a sudden, brilliant light. It is a bravura performance, and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a stunning little book."
To read the entire review, please click here. The City of Your Final Destination, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, The Weekend, & Andorra published by Picador Picador published a new paperback version of The Weekend, Cameron's second novel, in April 2009. The Weekend was first published in 1994 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and a year later in paperback by Plume, but has been out of print for several years. In May 2009 Picador also released paperback editions of Cameron's third novel, Andorra, and fifth novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. In April 2010, Picador published a new edition of The City of Your Final Destination, to coincide with the release of the Merchant Ivory film based upon the book. See sidebar for images of all the new Picador editions. 
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You on the Daily Beast's Buzz Board "Several weeks after finishing it, I am still thinking about the book’s erudite, confused hero, James, who’s grappling with his future, his sexuality, his screwed-up family, and his 9/11-scarred hometown. Cameron, a critically acclaimed adult author, won heaps of raves for this coming-of-age tale and I’m sure it sold fine, but somehow that doesn’t seem quite enough. I can’t get why everyone hasn’t read this book. Though it’s become a cliché to say so, Someday… deserves to join the pantheon of teen misfit-lit classics—right up there with Holden. With a paperback version coming out in April, there’s time to remedy that. Forget the YA label; it’s a book for the ages."
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You in the Barnes & Noble Review In Peter Cameron's new novel, his eighth work of fiction, the narrator is a disaffected teenage product of divorced, self-involved, and privileged parents. He is thus so emblematic of a typical upper-middle-class experience today that there is from the outset the potential for cliché, suggesting that Cameron has set himself an admirably difficult task. James Sveck, a Manhattanite, smacks of an updated Holden Caulfield, believing as he does that nearly everyone is a fraud, apart from a young man who runs his mother's art gallery and, touchingly, his grandmother. But Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You -- a work unfairly categorized as "young adult" -- is a keenly observed and elegantly drawn novel that skirts the problems typical of the post-Salinger teenage angst story.
To read the entire review, please click here. 
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You in The New York Times Book Review "His best work — it’s terrific, piercing and funny. The novel demonstrates every kind of strength...He will make a large portion of his audience, especially those who look for relief in books, feel excitingly understood. And he has a rarer ability: he will make many of them itch to write."
To read the complete review, click here 
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You in The Boston Globe The book both fits within and smashes any number of literary molds: coming-of-age novel, New York novel, 9/11 novel. From the first sentence, you'll be snagged by its precocious, funny-sad narrator and his you'd-pay-to-hear-him-read-the-phone-book voice."
Michael Lowenthal is the author of Charity Girl, which is now available in paperback. click here for link 
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You in Newsday "Peter Cameron's novels and story collections - such as The Weekend andThe City of Your Final Destination - are kept on the fiction shelves of your local library or bookstore, but you'll most likely find his new novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, in the young adult section. Cameron didn't set out to write a young adult novel, but his publisher is cross-marketing the book to teenagers because its narrator is a troubled 18-year-old boy. Was this a good idea? Grown-ups may be resistant to the idea of reading a young adult book. Teenagers, on the other hand, might not be able to single the book out from a genre stuffed with badly written "issue" fiction. Either way, it will be a shame if Cameron's book doesn't find a following on both sides of the age divide. It's the kind of novel that could be a great solace to an 18-year-old...His highly cultured, dryly funny voice, which seduces the reader from the first page on, makes Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You appealing to adult readers as well."
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You in The Chicago Tribune |
Readings & Events NEW YORK CITY Thursday, March 8, 7PM Strand Book Store 828 Broadway, 2nd Floor Conversation with Sigrid Nunez BOSTON Monday, March 10, 6PM Boston Public Library 700 Boylyston Street Reading with Margot Livesey NEW YORK CITY Tuesday, March 20, 7PM Three Lives & Co. 154 West 10th Street Reading Thursday, April 5, 7PM 192 Books 192 Tenth Avenue Reading Thursday, April 12, 7PM McNally Jackson Bookstore 52 Prince Street Reading with Catherine Chung LOS ANGELES April 21 - 22 (time TBA) L.A. Times Book Festival University of Southern California from Picador
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