From one of America's greatest comic novelists, a hilarious new novel about aging, family, loneliness, and love.
The Bergman clan has always stuck together, growing as it incorporated in-laws, ex-in-laws, and same-sex spouses. But, families don't just grow, they grow old, and the clan's matriarch, Joy, is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would have wished. When Joy's beloved husband dies, Molly and Daniel have no shortage of solutions for their mother's loneliness and despair, but there is one challenge they did not count on: the reappearance of an ardent suitor from Joy's college days. And, they didn't count on Joy herself, a mother suddenly as willful and rebellious as their own kids.
"Cathleen Schine [is] one of our most realistically imaginative, dependably readable novelists. . . [H]er ten books comprise a sly, illuminating corpus that seems more related to the English comic novel than to most contemporary American fiction. [S]hapely and precisely structured. . . ruefully satiric. . . buoyant. . . sharply observant. . . Her tenth and newest novel . . . cuts deeper, feels ful
Phillip Lopate, New York Review of Books
"Schine's painfully beautiful depiction of a woman's heroism in the face of that abyss offers, like the best literature, a reminder of the tender, frightening vulnerability we all share."
