The Need
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2.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Molly is exhausted, anxious, losing her grip on reality. Her husband is away and she is running between her children and her job, where things are unravelling. She’s a paleobotanist, working at a fossil quarry, and has recently unearthed artefacts that defy understanding; the coke bottle with the lettering that leans the wrong way, an alternative version of the Bible. Where do these things come from?
At home, as dusk falls, she gets jumpy. Are those footsteps out in the hall? What was that noise? She holds her two small children close to her, and tries to pull herself together. But her worlds of work and home are about to collide. She discovers that the stranger in her sitting room knows everything about her life and, as their identity becomes chillingly clear, this intruder makes a demand of Molly that upends everything, forcing her to reckon with her most unspeakable fears.
The Need is a gripping, unsettling and stunningly original story that probes deep truths about motherhood, and explores grief, loss and how we treat others. It’s a compulsive, reality-warping novel that makes us rethink our world, and question how far we would go to protect the ones we love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Phillips (The Beautiful Bureaucrat) delivers an unforgettable tour de force that melds nonstop suspense, intriguing speculation, and perfectly crafted prose. While excavating a fossil quarry, paleobotanist Molly Nye and her colleagues find plant fossils unconnected to all previously identified species and random objects a Bible describing God as "she," a toy soldier with a monkey's tail, a Coke bottle with a backwards-tilting logo with odd, seemingly pointless differences from their everyday counterparts. She feels uneasy when news of the Bible draws gawkers to the site, but anxiety is no stranger to Molly; balancing work with her nursing baby and feisty four-year-old, she struggles with "apocalyptic exhaustion" and a constant fear that disaster is about to strike her kids. While her musician husband, David, is performing abroad, real danger arrives in the form of a black-clad intruder, who wears the gold deer mask David gave Molly for her birthday and knows intimate details of Molly's life. As the stranger's mask comes literally and figuratively off en route to a startling conclusion to their confrontation, Molly veers between panic, appeasement, and empathy for an "other" whose story is uncannily like her own except in its tragedies. Structured in brief, sharply focused segments that shift back and forth in time, the novel interrogates the nature of the self, the powers and terrors of parenting, and the illusions of chronology. Yet it's also chock-full of small moments some scary, some tender, some darkly witty that ground its cerebral themes in a sharply observed evocation of motherhood. With its crossover appeal to lovers of thriller, science fiction, and literary fiction, this story showcases an extraordinary writer at her electrifying best.
Customer Reviews
Feeling needy
Author
American. Her previous novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015. She’s also published a children’s novel, two collections of stories, and won the a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Italo Calvino Prize. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, Tin House etc. She teaches at Brooklyn College. She is bald too. I’m not sure whether that’s a medical condition or a lifestyle choice.
Plot
Young mother home alone with her two kids, one still an infant and the other a moderately insufferable preschool girl, hears footsteps in the living room and fears the worst. It might be her imagination. Hubby’s a musician who is off on a gig in Argentina (!), and our gal is sleep deprived from breast feeding and trying to hold down a her job as a paleobotanist (!!). Better than working at Walmart, I suppose. Odd artefacts have been turning up at “the dig”, e.g. a turn of the 20th century Bible where God is referred to as ‘she’, an unusually shaped Altoids tin, a Coca-Cola bottle with writing that slopes backwards not forwards. This has generated media interest and fired up some religious nuts (Par for the course in the US nowadays). Turns out there is an intruder, who wears a papier mache deer head, as they do. Underneath the head is a big surprise. Things get weird from there.
Characters
Molly and her alter ego are the best developed. The little girl is a pain in the bum. Molly’s co-workers are co-workers.
Prose
Well-paced and builds tension early. Not so much after the mysterious stranger appears. Abundant gory detail about breast feeding.
Bottom line
I’m only a bloke, but surely someone could have explained to the protagonist that she’d get less leakage if she put absorbent padding inside her bra.