Right after the Weather
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“This timely novel takes on friendship, desire, fear, and vulnerability in one incisive, witty, and powerful package.” —People
“Astonishes with the force of its unexpected beauty.” —The New York Times Book Review
The author of the “graceful and compassionate” (People) New York Times bestseller Carry the One presents a new and long-awaited novel exploring what happens when untested people are put to a hard test, and in its aftermath, find themselves in a newly uncertain world.
It’s the fall of 2016. Cate, a set designer in her early forties, lives and works in Chicago’s theater community. She has stayed too long at the fair and knows it’s time to get past her prolonged adolescence and stop taking handouts from her parents. She has a firm plan to get solvent and settled in a serious relationship. She has tentatively started something new even as she’s haunted by an old, going-nowhere affair. Her ex-husband, recently booted from his most recent marriage, is currently camped out in Cate’s spare bedroom, in thrall to online conspiracy theories, and she’s not sure how to help him. Her best friend Neale, a yoga instructor, lives nearby with her son and is Cate’s model for what serious adulthood looks like.
Only a few blocks away, but in a parallel universe we find Nathan and Irene—casual sociopaths, drug addicts, and small-time criminals. Their world and Cate’s intersect the day she comes into Neale’s kitchen to find these strangers assaulting her friend. Forced to take fast, spontaneous action, Cate does something she’s never even considered. She now also knows the violence she is capable of, as does everyone else in her life, and overnight, their world has changed. Anshaw’s flawed, sympathetic, and uncannily familiar characters grapple with their altered relationships and identities against the backdrop of the new Trump presidency and a country waking to a different understanding of itself. Eloquent, moving, and beautifully observed, Right after the Weather is the work of a master of exquisite prose and a wry and compassionate student of the human condition writing at the height of her considerable powers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anshaw (Carry the One) brings a fresh, keen voice to this story of modern lesbian life. In 2016 Chicago, 40-something Cate, a theater set designer, needs a boost in her low-level career. Her likable, wealthy, neurotic ex-husband Graham is temporarily living with her, despite their divorce many years before, when Cate had accepted that she was a lesbian. Cate tries to improve her unsatisfying life and recover from the mortification of Trump winning the 2016 presidential election by dating a seemingly ideal woman, a costume designer named Maureen, but Cate's quirks and immaturity prevent her from convincing herself that she has found a just-right partner, or that she can achieve security in her profession. The narrative also features a thread involving two scruffy adults who stopped by for candy on Halloween and turn out to be addicts, and the narrative occasionally turns to brief vignettes of their lives with drugs and the homes they invade, adding suspense and culminating with a violent intersection of the two story lines. The danger of the addicts inspires the creative Cate, who has been surviving mostly on help from others, to grow up. Anshaw's account of a woman seeking love as she struggles to make a living in her chosen profession will captivate readers.
