The Most Fun We Ever Had The Most Fun We Ever Had

The Most Fun We Ever Had

Now a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick

    • 4.1 • 100 Ratings
    • $12.99

Publisher Description

APRIL 2024 REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2020
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

'A literary love child of Jonathan Franzen and Anne Tyler . . . outstanding and highly enjoyable' Observer

'The Most Fun We Ever Had is as good as books come' Telegraph

'I loved this book' Bryony Gordon

'The perfect, engrossing holiday read' RED

'A gripping and poignant ode to a messy, loving family in all its glory' Madeline Miller

'A moving, immersive, often very funny study of family and sisterhood' Sunday Times

'Like Meg Wolitzer. A forensic dissection of family past and present, I loved it. If you like reading about relationships, this one is for you.' Pandora Sykes

MEET THE SORENSON FAMILY.

MARILYN has somehow fallen into motherhood and spent four decades married to
DAVID, who's pretty certain he loves her more than anyone has ever loved another person.
WENDY, their eldest, a cause for concern, soothes herself with drink after being widowed young,
while VIOLET, lawyer-turned-stay-at-home-mother, is disturbed by the reappearance of a son placed for adoption fifteen years earlier.
LIZA, a professor, is pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves
and GRACE, their dawdling youngest daughter, lives a lie that no one in her family suspects.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2019
25 June
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
544
Pages
PUBLISHER
Orion
SELLER
Hachette Australia Pty Ltd
SIZE
3.8
MB

Customer Reviews

rhitc ,

Dream debut

4.5 stars
This is the first novel by Chicago-born Ms Lombardo, a social worker who took herself off to the Iowa Writer's Workshop to get an MFA.
It's a multigenerational family saga involving an upper middle class Chicago family: David and Marilyn Sorenson and their four daughters Wendy, Violet, Liza, and Grace.
David is a 60-something retired family medical practitioner, Marilyn owns and operates a hardware store.
Wendy is a rich widow in her late thirties fond of alcohol, drugs, younger men and sundry mischief making.
Violet is a lawyer married to another lawyer and now a stay-at-home mother to two toddler sons. She had another son out of wedlock 15 years before, and gave him up for adoption. But Jonah is back now.
Liza is a 32-year-old newly pregnant, recently tenured humanities academic. Her partner Ryan is unable to work due to depression.
Grace, 9 years younger than Liza, is living hand-to-mouth in Oregon while feeding her family at story about her non-existent acceptance into law school.
Character-driven domestic dramady follows, the narrative unfolding in chapters that rattle between the points of view of each protagonist, while moving backwards and forwards in time to supple backstory.
That sounds messy, but Ms Lombardo makes it work. In fact, she nails it. The book runs to 530 pages, and they fly by, the prose crisp, witty at times, deadly serious at others.
This is as good a first novel as I've read in a long time.

IrishBets ,

Intertwined family angst

Entertaining, but amounting to nothing.I kept thinking something was going to happen.

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