EARLY PRAISE

“If You Leave is an engrossing, moving portrait of friendship and motherhood. Margaret Hutton is a gifted writer who knows how to convey human vulnerabilities and life’s fragile connections to haunting effect.” —Jill McCorkle, author of Old Crimes and Hieroglyphics

“In Margaret Hutton’s beautifully written novel, we meet Audrey and Lucille, friends driven apart by a secret, but then bound by an impossible request. If You Leave is a powerful and timely story, deeply examining the difficult choices women and mothers must make around issues of art and family and caretaking. I loved it.” —Jessica Francis Kane, author of Rules for Visiting and Fonseca

“Exquisite! With a painter’s skill, Margaret Hutton builds up layers of longing worthy of Elizabeth Strout and William Trevor. On every page, If You Leave pits desire against duty, somehow convincing the reader to root for both. Each deftly drawn character wants the freedom to leave, but no one wants to be abandoned. Or, to quote the novel itself, ‘Who’s in charge of love? It’s loose in the world, nobody steering it.’” —Mary Kay Zuravleff, author of American Ending

If You Leave is tender and razor-sharp, empathetic and unsentimental. Its evocation of wartime Washington, DC, captures brilliantly the texture of everyday life, both the limbo of waiting for the war’s end and the pinched quality of women’s lives. Margaret Hutton has written a wonderful novel about two indelible women, working through the meaning of motherhood and selfhood as the country changes around them. It’s about betrayals and forgiveness, the necessity—and the costs—of leaving, about coming, however belatedly, into your own. Beautiful.” —Molly McCloskey, author of Straying and Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother

“If You Leave is an intellectual page-turner with a powerful emotional underbelly. The author’s moral curiosity adds a unique richness to her depiction of choice and chance in two women’s lives. Audrey, an artist, vacillates between responsibility to her talent and love of her family. Lucille, a fugitive turned stalker, offers as much as she takes away. As Hutton masterfully probes the selfishness and sacrifice that love and life demand from us all, she delivers an entirely fresh work of fiction.” —Boo Trundle, author of The Daughter Ship

“This sweeping, revelatory novel explores the complications of mothering and of everything that can come with it: a sense of obligation, resentment over personal sacrifices, and through all of this, an enduring bond of love. By immersing us in the lives and travails of the two women at the heart of the story, Hutton also considers the bonds of friendship, how far they can be tested, and how much we owe —or can expect from—others we’ve grown close to. With lyricism, insight, and compassion, If You Leave considers how seemingly broken relationships can mend, and how the most lasting or meaningful bonds aren’t always forged by blood. The novel captivated me from the first page to the very end.” —Beth Castrodale, author of The Inhabitants and I Mean You No Harm

“‘Loss often hides in the layers of color’—Margaret Hutton’s exquisite debut novel sketches her characters and their impossible situations, then begins to paint them fully with intricate blendings, broad strokes, and smears off the paper. If You Leave follows two women who meet in Washington, DC, during the tumultuous years of World War II. Their choices in love, friendship and motherhood keep them both bonded and bruised as the story builds, back and forth in time, ever confident, lovely, and disturbing.” —Kathleen Novak, author of Come Back, I Love You [A Ghost Story]

“If You Leave will crack your heart and repair it with transportive precision and luxurious prose. Steeped in themes of motherhood, abandonment, and loss, the novel spans three decades. Every character transcends the page and takes root in your bones. What may be more astonishing than the intoxicating writing is how the artful, elegant parts are balanced against the whole, a vibrant, well-paced story of the ‘delicate fretwork’ of female confidences turned tangled family saga.” —Laura Scalzo, author of American Arcadia

“If Margaret Hutton’s prose were a painting, it would be a Vermeer. If You Leave speaks to the deepest truth of maternal obligation, with its commensurate joys and frustrations, resentments, compromises, and bargains. Audrey’s predicament captures the often unspoken reality of what it feels like to be a new mother for the first time. It happens in an instant and we spend the rest of our lives negotiating the losses and gains of that transformation. Audrey’s struggle to remain true to her identity as an artist, while reluctantly surrendering to her role as mother, mirrors this cleaving of the self and the urgent, necessary effort to reconcile it.” —Alexandra Zapruder, author of Twenty-Six Seconds and Salvaged Pages