Cobble Hill
A Novel
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3.8 • 13 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Gossip Girl series brings her sharp-eyed and irresistible wit to this “quirky novel of lovable misfits” (Publishers Weekly) chronicling a year in the lives of four families in an upscale Brooklyn neighborhood as they seek purpose and community—until one unforgettable night at a raucous neighborhood party knocks them to their senses.
Welcome to Cobble Hill.
In this eclectic Brooklyn neighborhood, private storms brew among four married couples and their children. There’s ex-groupie Mandy, so underwhelmed by motherhood and her current physical state that she fakes a debilitating disease to get the attention of her skateboarding, ex-boyband member husband Stuart. There’s the unconventional new school nurse, Peaches, on whom Stuart has an unrequited crush, and her disappointing husband Greg, who wears noise-cancelling headphones—everywhere.
A few blocks away, Roy, a well-known, newly transplanted British novelist, has lost the thread of his next novel and his marriage to indefatigable Wendy. Around the corner, Tupper, the nervous, introverted industrial designer with a warehouse full of prosthetic limbs struggles to pin down his elusive artist wife Elizabeth. Throw in two hormonal teenagers, a ten-year-old pyromaniac, a drug dealer pretending to be a doctor, and a lot of hidden cameras, and you’ve got a combustible mix of egos, desires, and secrets bubbling in brownstone Brooklyn.
“Breezy, witty, and compulsively fun to read” (Kirkus Reviews), Cobble Hill is a highly entertaining portrait of contemporary family life and the colorful characters who call Brooklyn home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This amusing romp from von Ziegesar (the Gossip Girl series) centers on an ensemble cast of self-aware, alienated couples in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Cobble Hill. Roy Clarke, famed British novelist of the cult hit Rainbow series, functions as the book's center, arriving in Cobble Hill at the insistence of his critical wife, Wendy, who had hoped moving from London to New York City to take the features editor job at a fashion magazine would give her life a new direction. Roy, along with Wendy and their awkward adolescent daughter, Shy, hoped to "slip into Brooklyn and discover it quietly, be discovered by it quietly," and in Roy's efforts to overcome his six-year writing drought, he finds inspiration in his new neighborhood's oddball residents: lonely Tupper Paulsen, a commercially successful but superficial artist; Tupper's eccentric, seldom-seen performance artist wife, Elizabeth; sexy, dimpled Peaches, an English-major dropout and public school nurse with unrealized drummer dreams; Peaches's awkward teenage son, Liam, who is self-diagnosed with Asperger's and in love with Shy; and Stuart Little, a former rock star determined to be a good dad and a good husband to his wife, Mandy. The roiling tensions within and between families break into the open during the Bonfire Night party Roy throws for the neighborhood. Von Ziegesar's quirky novel of lovable misfits will appeal to fans of Tom Perrotta.
