Addressing race, risk, retreat, and the ripple effects of a national emergency, Alam's novel is just in time for this moment.
An interrupted family vacation, unexpected visitors, a mysterious blackout—something is happening, and the world may never be the same.
On a reassuringly sunny summer day, Amanda, an account director in advertising; Clay, a college professor; and their children, Archie, 15, and Rose, 13, make their way from Brooklyn to a luxury home (swimming pool! hot tub! marble countertops!) in a remote area of Long Island they’ve rented for a family vacation. Shortly after they arrive, however, the family’s holiday is interrupted by a knock on the door: The house’s owners, a prosperous older Black couple—George Washington and his wife, Ruth—have shown up unannounced because New York City has been plunged into a blackout and their Park Avenue high-rise apartment didn’t feel safe. Soon it becomes clear that the blackout is a symptom (or is it a cause?) of something larger—and nothing is safe. Has there been a nuclear or climate disaster, a war, a terrorist act, a bomb? Alam’s story unfolds like a dystopian fever dream cloaked in the trappings of a dream vacation: Why do hundreds of deer show up in the house’s well-maintained backyard or a flock of bright-pink flamingos frolic in the family pool and then fly away? What is the noise, loud enough to crack glass, that comes, without warning, once and then, later, repeatedly? Is it safer to go back to the city, to civilization, or to remain away, in a world apart? As they search for answers and adjust to what increasingly appears to be a confusing new normal, the two families—one Black, one White; one older, one younger; one rich, one middle-class—are compelled to find community amid calamity, to come together to support each other and survive. As he did in his previous novels, Rich and Pretty (2016) and That Kind of Mother (2018), Alam shows an impressive facility for getting into his characters’ heads and an enviable empathy for their moral shortcomings, emotional limitations, and failures of imagination. The result is a riveting novel that thrums with suspense yet ultimately offers no easy answers—disappointing those who crave them even as it fittingly reflects our time.
Addressing race, risk, retreat, and the ripple effects of a national emergency, Alam's novel is just in time for this moment.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-266763-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
PROFILES
A captivating novel.
On the cusp of motherhood, a woman faces peril.
Annie is 37 weeks pregnant, shopping for a crib at IKEA, when suddenly she feels a terrible jolt, “a wave underneath me,” she thinks, “lifting me up.” An earthquake has hit Portland. In her assured debut novel, Pattee follows Annie through a horrific day: With wreckage all around her, she is intent on making her way to find her husband. She has miles to walk, it’s hot, she’s hungry and thirsty and afraid. She’s alone, and yet not alone, because she’s carrying a child, her precious Bean. “How did we get here, Bean?,” she asks. “You and me, IKEA, Monday morning, AISLE 8, BIN 31, hand on metal rack, eyes wide in fear, body tensed like a firecracker about to explode?” As she trudges across devastating landscapes—collapsed houses, bridges, and schools; supermarkets and convenience stores overrun by looters; bodies of the wounded and dead—Annie answers that question by beginning 17 years earlier, when she fell in love with Bean’s father, Dom, and they set out together to fulfill their dreams of becoming stars: she, a playwright; he, an actor. But Annie gave up writing, and Dom, while tirelessly auditioning, works at a cafe. Annie worries, as she walks, about their lack of money “to have a baby, much less feed a baby, much less house a baby, much less pay somebody to watch said baby.” She worries that they’ll never be able to afford a home of their own, with real estate prices ballooning. She worries about her ability for mothering, for being a “lifelong cheerleader” for her husband, and about realizing their dashed dreams. Recounting Annie’s precarious journey across the city and into her past, Pattee reveals that the quake has upended more than the earth.
A captivating novel.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781668055472
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
An emotionally acute study of manliness.
Scenes from the life of a well-off but emotionally damaged man.
Szalay’s sixth novel is a study of István, who as a 15-year-old in Hungary is lured into a sexual relationship with a married neighbor; when he has a confrontation with the woman’s husband, the man falls down the stairs and dies. Add in stints in a juvenile facility and as a soldier in Iraq, and István enters his 20s almost completely stunted emotionally. (Saying much besides “Okay” sometimes seems utterly beyond him.) Fueled by id, libido, and street drugs, he seems destined to be a casualty until, while working as a bouncer at a London strip club, he helps rescue the owner of a security firm who’s been assaulted; soon, he’s hired as the driver for a tycoon and his wife, with whom he begins an affair. István is a fascinating character in a kind of negative sense—he’s intriguing for all the ways he fails to confront his trauma, all the missed opportunities to find deeper connections. To that end, Szalay’s prose is emotionally bare, deliberately clipped and declarative, evoking István’s unwillingness (or incapacity) to look inside himself; he occasionally consults with a therapist, but a relentless passivity keeps him from opening up much. His capacity to fail upwards eventually catches up with him, and the novel becomes a more standard story about betrayal and inheritances, but it also turns on small but meaningful moments of heroism that suggest a deeper character than somebody who, as someone suggests, “exemplif[ies] a primitive form of masculinity.” István’s relentlessly stony approach to existence grates at times—there are a few too many “okay”s in the dialogue—but Szalay’s distanced approach has its payoffs. Being closed off, like István, doesn’t close off the world, and at times has tragic consequences.
An emotionally acute study of manliness.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781982122799
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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