Shelter in Place
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Publisher Description
'Very funny and unexpected, a material response to our times, plush as velvet' Rachel Cusk
'A wickedly funny and emotionally expansive novel' Jenny Offill
It is the Saturday after the 2016 presidential election, and in a plush weekend house in Connecticut, a group of New Yorkers has gathered to recover from what they consider the greatest political catastrophe of their lives. Liberal and like-minded, the friends have come to the countryside in the hope of restoring the bubble in which they have grown used to living.
Moving through her days accompanied by a carefully curated salon, Eva Lindquist is a generous hostess with an obsession for decorating. Yet when, in her avidity to secure shelter for herself, she persuades her husband to buy a grand if dilapidated apartment in Venice, she unwittingly sets off the chain of events that will propel him to venture outside the bubble and embark on an unexpected love affair.
A slyly comic look at the shelter industry, Shelter in Place is a novel about house and home, safety and freedom and the insidious ways in which political upheaval can undermine even the most seemingly impregnable foundations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Leavitt (The Two Hotel Francforts) turns a gimlet eye on a group of wealthy New Yorkers whose lives revolve around the excitable Eva Lindquist. After the 2016 election, Eva sets out to buy an apartment in Venice so she can sit out Trump's presidency safely in Europe. Eva's earnest husband, Bruce, is a wealth management consultant who's amassed a considerable fortune and accepts that Eva "does the wanting and I do the paying." He acquiesces to purchasing a dilapidated place Eva describes as a "decorator's dream." Eva is accompanied on her numerous trips to Venice by Min Marable, a lifelong friend who readily name-drops every magazine she's ever worked at, from Good Housekeeping to Mademoiselle, while Bruce helps his assistant, Kathy, as she goes through chemotherapy treatments for non-Hodgkins lymphoma after her husband left her. Leavitt gleefully skewers his characters and those in their orbit top-tier Manhattan decorators get into internecine fights, and a recently fired book editor friend of the Lindquists excoriates what he calls the "fucking Jonathans" (Foer, Franzen, Lethem, etc.) and nearly pulls off a surprise ending, which, though out of left field, adds to the amusement. This irresistible, laugh-out-loud romp is a winner.
