Summer Cannibals
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Sisterly bonds, dark desires, and terrible secrets converge in this “tale of scorching family dysfunction that ranges among the gothic, domestic, and carnal” (Publishers Weekly).
Summoned to their magnificent family home on the shores of Lake Ontario—a paradisiacal mansion perched on an escarpment above the city—three adult sisters come together in what seems like an act of family solidarity. Pregnant and unwell, the youngest has left her husband and four young children in New Zealand and returned home to heal. But while their home features immaculate gardens the likes of which few could imagine possessing, it is also a place of trauma and vengeance, where family togetherness leads to feasting on each other’s sexual appetites and weaknesses. Each daughter has her own particular taste, and overlaying everything is their parents, with unquenchable cravings of their own.
As the affluent family endures six intense days in one another’s company, old fissures reappear. When long-buried truths finally come to light, the sisters and their parents must face the unthinkable consequences of their actions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Hobson's scattershot debut, three grown sisters Georgina, Jax, and Pippa converge on their troubled parents' waterfront mansion along the banks of Lake Ontario. Ostensibly summoned there for a garden tour, each of the sisters arrives burdened with emotional baggage: Pippa, eight months pregnant, has curiously left her husband and four children back in New Zealand; Georgina, an academic, is alienated from her own husband, also an academic; Jax, also married, has unresolved romantic issues with a high school love interest. Add to this confluence of marital drama the bizarre, licentious relationship between the women's parents, David and Margaret, and the plot starts to seem like a few bad marriages too many. The tour leaves David's beloved garden trampled, then a mysterious young woman, dubbed "Goldilocks" by Margaret, shows up sleeping in a guest room bed. From there, the novel tips into melodramatic territory, as readers discover of a slew of secrets and revelations, including Pippa's husband's interest in polyamory. Though occasionally evocative, the writing isn't precise or particular enough to sustain interest in the novel's various scandalous threads. The stately house at the center of the novel exerts a profound hold on its characters, one that never fully grabs the reader.
