Ordinary Hazards
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
For fans of Celeste Ng comes a transfixing debut novel about how life’s small decisions can ultimately yield the most powerful consequences.
Everyone always wants to know why relationships fail. It’s a spiteful curiosity thing, schadenfreude, but also a self-preservation thing. People want to understand how to avoid the fall.
The answer is complicated. There isn’t one reason, one event. It has something to do with smoking cigarettes and drinking all night. It takes into account thousands of hours of labour on a small house, projects finished and unfinished. It is late-night conversations and inside jokes and making love and having a child. The answer is wrapped up, shrouded and ensconced in prioritization, ambition and work. Caring about these things is not the problem. Not caring about them is death.
Emma has settled into her hometown bar for the evening. It was in this very room that she met Lucas a few years back, on a blind date. Nine months ago, in unimaginable circumstances, they divorced.
As Emma listens to the locals’ banter, key facts about her life story begin to emerge and the past comes bearing down on her like a freight train.
A powerhouse in the business world, why has she ended up here, now a regular in the last bar on the edge of a small town? What is she running away from? And what is she willing to give up in order to recapture the love she has lost?
As Emma teeters on the edge of oblivion, becoming more booze-soaked by the hour, her night begins to spin out of control with shocking results.
‘Seen through keen eyes and full of deep feeling, Ordinary Hazards delves into the psyche of a woman grappling with grief, loss, and the burdens of inheritance. Anna Bruno vividly renders the messiness of a single human life in all its joy and heartbreak.’ —CLAIRE LOMBARDO, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had
‘Crisp, haunting, and intelligent. Beneath the surface of this booze-soaked, small town, dive bar novel lies a devastating story of loss, guilt, and grief. Bruno’s narrator proves a dark, funny, unflinching companion as you descend with her, step by step, towards the revelation of what has led her to the bar tonight.’ —STEPHEN MARKLEY, author of Ohio
'Quiet but emotionally engaging, this atmospheric novel has a raft of enduring characters who prompt her memories. Bruno has a gift for observation which she uses to produce a haunting examination of love, loss and grief.’ —Fanny Blake, Daily Mail
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Bruno's engrossing debut, 30-something Emma returns from her new home in Brooklyn to the Final Final dive bar in Wilton, N.Y., where she met her ex-husband, Lucas, five years earlier. Through flashbacks, Emma reflects on good times with Lucas and becoming a mother before their divorce, and Bruno slowly draws out the details around devastating events that lead to Emma's heartbreak. Despite her job as a hedge fund manager, which requires her to be alert before the markets open, Emma spends the evening in Wilton near Lucas, where "there's a fine line between rustic and run-down," as opposed to her own Brooklyn neighborhood. After one of the regulars, Martin "Yag" Yagla a longtime friend of Lucas confronts Emma for lingering, Emma muses on how Wilton tethers her to memories of her former family. Emma has it out for Yag, and decides to get him banned from the Final Final by slipping a man's wallet into his jacket, then accusing him of stealing it. The skirmish is resolved, yet it has ramifications, as Emma and Yag grapple with events surrounding the dissolution of Emma's family. While the Upstate and Brooklyn descriptions verge on clich , the author convincingly portrays Emma's ambition, grief, and desire to move on from the past. In the end, Bruno's thoughtful tale offers memorable insights on the meaning of home.