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I LOVE YOU MORE

A thoughtfully written, original and entertaining exploration of events ignited by love and lies.

An unscrupulous husband’s murder produces many suspects in Murphy’s absorbing debut, a faint nod to Agatha Christie.

When lawyer Oliver Lane is shot to death at the family’s summer rental on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, his wife appears a likely suspect. Then two other women who claim to be married to Oliver come forward, and the investigation takes several unusual turns. As Detective Kyle Kennedy travels to each spouse’s home in separate parts of the state, he notes that the wives sport similar coifs and uniformly deny prior knowledge of the others’ existence. Aside from their haircuts, the women are resolutely different: First wife Diana is artistic, beautiful and gracious, the quintessential Southern lady; Jewels, an architect and the second wife, is athletic, angular and brusque; and cerebral bookstore manager Bert, the third wife, is nurturing and spiritual. Told from multiple points of view—but most interestingly from the perspective of Picasso, Oliver’s precocious, dictionary-reading 12 year-old daughter with Diana—Murphy examines the periods before and after the murder while providing tantalizing glimpses into the minds of a manipulative sociopath and his targets. Picasso knows more than she admits and tries to make sense of events and her emotions while worrying about the future. During the course of the investigation, she evolves from a socially ostracized wallflower into a pretty and popular schemer. Kyle falls in love with one of the wives, and though he suspects she's involved in the murder, he feels compelled to seek the truth. The women recognize that their survival depends on maintaining their secrets and protecting each other, at least for a time. Although the author’s decision to insert an additional perspective into the narrative toward the end results in a slightly awkward disruption, her fluent style and descriptive language produce a very readable story with well-articulated characters.

A thoughtfully written, original and entertaining exploration of events ignited by love and lies.

Pub Date: June 17, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-385-53855-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

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NORMAL PEOPLE

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
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  • Our Verdict
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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2019


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  • IndieBound Bestseller

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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