by Scott Lasser ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 12, 2009
A novel with barely a wasted word or an emotion that doesn’t ring true.
A taut, masterfully controlled and profoundly moving novel about family ties—blood or otherwise.
The prologue to the third novel by Lasser (All I Could Get, 2002, etc.) begins ominously, in New York, on the morning of the day that the chapter title identifies simply as “9/11.” “What a glorious day,” thinks 41-year-old Kyle, a bond trader who has done so well for himself that he plans to retire in four years. He has just paid for his sister, Cat, two years older, to come visit him from Detroit, and the two commemorate the death of their mother so many years ago. Kyle reveals that a woman with whom he had recently ended a passionate affair has a baby son, apparently his. So life goes on, until it so abruptly doesn’t, for Kyle and for his former lover, who also dies that day, leaving Cat to come to terms with the fact that her beloved brother may well have left a son behind. Cat also has a son, from a marriage that was a mistake, and a father from whom she isn’t quite estranged but with whom she isn’t particularly close. As the novel unfolds at a matter-of-fact pace, wallowing neither in melodrama nor sentimentality, chapters alternate between those in which Cat’s life unfolds and those featuring her father, who wants to reunite with her, a year after his son’s death, for a ceremony of the Jewish faith in which neither of them believes, “paying reverence to an unknown God, often in a language they could not understand.” By then both father and daughter have secrets they’re reluctant to share. In the wake of shattering loss, they must pick up the pieces while negotiating the delicate balance between holding on and moving on. In the process, they rediscover the essence of family, how it helps them to “handle life, the way it unfolded, uncertain and unknowable.”
A novel with barely a wasted word or an emotion that doesn’t ring true.Pub Date: June 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27119-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Kirkus Prize
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National Book Award Finalist
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018
A tour de force.
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New York Times Bestseller
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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