Imagine Me Gone
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2017
2017 PULITZER PRIZE Finalist for Fiction
TIME Top Ten Novels of 2016
'It might be the best American novel about a middle-class family since Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections' Independent
'Exceptional, haunting, distinctive... [It] resembles the work of Anne Tyler, intertwining grief and love... Intimate and panoramic' The Sunday Times
'Dreadfully sad and hilariously funny. Literature of the highest order' Peter Carey
Universal and essential, the heart-breaking story of an ordinary American family shaped by tragedy
Michael's father walked into the woods one day, and out of his family's life for ever. Yet he and his brother and sister see it less as a tragedy in their past and more as a forewarning of the future. For Michael - smart, brilliant, so alive and vital - feels the darkness that drew their father away and how, given the chance, it might take the whole family. He wants to save them - but can he save himself?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Here was the world unfettered by dread... The present had somehow ceased to be an emergency," writes Michael, the eldest son of a tightly knit British-American family, when he receives his first dose of Klonopin. Pulitzer-finalist Haslett's latest is a sprawling, ambitious epic about a family bound not only by familial love, but by that sense of impending emergency that hovers around Michael, who has inherited his father John's abiding depression and anxiety. The book begins with the family as a nuclear unit, the narrative switching among the parents and the kids (Michael, Celia, and Alec), as a cure for Michael's condition seems close. When tragedy undermines the unit, though, the search for an antidote takes on a new urgency, as Michael cycles through obsessions with music and girlfriends, and Celia and Alec attempt to keep their own relationships afloat. This is a book that tenderly and luminously deals with mental illness and with the life of the mind. Occasionally, the narrative style (it switches among monologues, letters, and messages from the doctor's office) feels stiff. But in Michael, Haslett has created a most memorable character. This is a hypnotic and haunting novel.