Overview
“Instantly seduces even the most news-addled reader with its lovely, lucid prose, its spot-on period details (those pay phones!) and superb gift for description . . . The novel evolves from its innocent opening into something more intriguing . . . [L]ike a narrative love child of Alice Munro . . . and Elizabeth Strout . . . Huneven is exceptionally generous with all of her characters and remains a compassionate guide through the secrets and lies, betrayals and chance encounters, losses and disappointments that buffet this broken and remade family over time.” —Helen Schulman, New York Times Book Review
“Perfectly captures the unpredictability of life . . . Huneven knows just how to seduce us with this family’s adventures . . . With extraordinary candor and tenderness, Huneven shuffles through those raw months when hope feels like a cheat as the Samuelsons are unmade and remade by tragedy . . . Right down to its final moments, Huneven casually offers up little revelations that crunch as sweet and tart as pomegranate seeds.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post
A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after the loss of their son Ellis
When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.
From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.
Michelle Huneven is “known for five enthralling novels, which chronicle the lives of middle-class Americans in her lushly conjured native California, as her characters struggle with addiction, excruciating romances, and resounding losses as they continue to seek meaning and a way to be good” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). She captures the Samuelson clan with glorious precision and the deepest empathy as they fracture and rebuild again and again.
“Perfectly captures the unpredictability of life . . . Huneven knows just how to seduce us with this family’s adventures . . . With extraordinary candor and tenderness, Huneven shuffles through those raw months when hope feels like a cheat as the Samuelsons are unmade and remade by tragedy . . . Right down to its final moments, Huneven casually offers up little revelations that crunch as sweet and tart as pomegranate seeds.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post
A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after the loss of their son Ellis
When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.
From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.
Michelle Huneven is “known for five enthralling novels, which chronicle the lives of middle-class Americans in her lushly conjured native California, as her characters struggle with addiction, excruciating romances, and resounding losses as they continue to seek meaning and a way to be good” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). She captures the Samuelson clan with glorious precision and the deepest empathy as they fracture and rebuild again and again.
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