Synopsis
In Winners and Losers a teenage runaway and a gruff old man come to realize, each in their way, that knowledge need not mean having all the answers, while they attempt to fathom the connection between obligation and love.
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Reviews
“Marina Antropow Cramer’s Winners and Losers is as lovely an evocation o̶f yearning, loss, and the ties that bind as any I have read. Isolated Uncle Herman, his grandniece Lily, who arrives at his doorstep in search of her absent father, and Stepan, the home’s eccentric tenant form an unconventional but true family. Gradually, they reveal their longstanding wounds to each other and begin to resolve them by honoring what matters most: love. Cramer’s gifts are many: her unerring eye for domestic detail, her keen ear for the spoken and unspoken in any conversation, her deep understanding of the past’s impact on the present, and her masterful ability to bring every scene to life. The reader will embrace these very real people from the novella’s first page, and won’t be able to put it down.”
—Roselee Blooston, author of the novel Trial by Family, an IPPY Gold Medal Winner, the collection The Chocolate Jar and Other Stories, and the memoirs, Dying in Dubai.
“In Winners and Losers, Marina Antropow Cramer constructs a deeply moving and carefully considered history of family dysfunction. Lily is a smart teenager from an immigrant background whose communication with her father is limited to his occasional cryptic postcards; her mother has been missing for years. This psychologically astute and effective novel probes how we forgive and integrate a broken past into our lives. A thoughtful and memorable family story.”
—Anatoly Molotkov, poet and novelist, author of Future Symptoms, The Catalog of Broken Things, Synonyms for Silence, and A Bag Full of Stones (2025).
“Winners and Losers by Marina Cramer introduces us to Lily and Uncle Herman, a grandniece and great-uncle pairing as unlikely as one can imagine. We learn why Lily has come east to live with him as her story unfolds and the roots of loneliness are revealed in each. What drives these characters forward is an emptiness where family should have been. There is a sadness, but also an emergent joy as they navigate through each other’s obstacles, past and present, external and internal. Written with intense emotional observation of these character’s inner lives and how that plays out in real time, Winners and Losers recognizes how much we all need to love those who dare to do the challenging work of loving us through the resistance that insists that life should be a certain way when often it is far, far different.”
—Nancy Burke, author of Death Cleaning and Other Units of Measure and Only the Women are Burning.
“Marina Antropow Cramer’s newest novel, Winners and Losers is, as its heart, a meditation on family, told through the uneasy lens of characters struggling with their very private family issues, and who illustrate how the lack of family can shape our lives as powerfully as its presence. The novel is filled with the small yet telling mundane details that make a story come alive; the actual theme is never stated but hides in the margins, much like the longing that hides inside Uncle Herman and his grandniece, Lily. It is this sense of unstated emotion that makes these two unusual characters stay with the reader long after the book’s conclusion. Uncle Herman and Lily are unique and unforgettable, embodying the theme of family, and also of longing, with their unconventional personas. At the end the reader will want to give them both a hug—as well as one for the author for creating this very original, engrossing, and deeply felt tale.”
—Martin Golan, author of the novels My Wife’s Last Lover, One Night with Lilith, Where Things are When you Lose Them (short stories), and A Note of Consolation for Lucia Joyce (poetry).
“Winners and Losers is a beautifully written, heartfelt story about a young girl searching for her place in the world among adults she cannot recognize as also lost. I deeply admired the slow build here toward the climax; this felt true to how difficult it is to see reality and to change. Marina Cramer has given us a wise, thoughtful novel.”
—Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point, In the Gloaming, Think of England, and Naked to the Waist.
