PATRICIA GROSSMAN 

Something’s not quite right in Emma and Gerald’s four-bedroom house on Hawthorne Drive in suburban Long Island. Former social worker Emma Mallick finds herself longing for the undomesticated landscape of her childhood summers in Maine, a place where people think of thunderstorms as dazzling spectacles and do not hide from them as she and her neighbors do. Emma’s husband, Gerald Strauss, finds no satisfaction in his thriving radiology practice—indeed, begins to view it as he might any crass means of turning a profit. And Aaron, their 18-year-old son, is not following what one of Gerald’s medical partners calls “the approved and prescribed path to adulthood.” Husband and wife each find themselves needing a role model to lead the way—an archetypal figure most of their contemporaries would find quaint.

 

"An affecting tale of suburban familial angst. . . Grossman makes quiet desperation palpable.”

—Publishers Weekly 

 

"One can only admire the subtle, nuanced portraits of Patricia Grossman’s embattled characters in this perceptive, beautifully written novel.”

—Marian Thurm, author of Today Is Not Your Day

 

“With this novel, Patricia Grossman shows that the truth of a family can lie not in its well-lit, photo op moments but rather in its shadows.”

—Carol Anshaw, author of Carry the One