The Alternatives
A Novel
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“A bold, beautiful, complex novel, and I can’t wait to read what Hughes writes next. She, too, is an unstoppable force.” —New York Times Book Review
“A tale about sisterhood, a novel of ideas, a chronicle of our collective follies, a requiem for our agonizing species, The Alternatives unfolds in a prose full of gorgeous surprises and glows with intelligence, compassion, and beauty.” —Hernan Diaz
From the writer Anthony Doerr calls “a massive talent,” the story of four brilliant Irish sisters, orphaned in childhood, who scramble to reconnect when the oldest disappears into the Irish countryside
The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties—all single, all with PhDs—they are each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to ritzy catering gigs in London’s Notting Hill, until one day their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her work and home. Together for the first time in years, the Flatterys descend on the Irish countryside in search of a sister who doesn’t want to be found. Sheltered in a derelict bungalow, they reach into their common past, confronting both old wounds and a desperately uncertain future. Warm, fiercely witty, and unexpectedly hopeful, The Alternatives is an unforgettable portrait of a family perched on our collective precipice, told by one of Ireland’s most gifted storytellers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A 39-year-old geology professor disappears from her Galway campus, prompting her three sisters to reunite and track her down, in the intelligent if uneven latest from Hughes (The Wild Laughter). When Olwen Flattery was 18, her parents died in an accidental fall from a cliff, and she became legal guardian of her three younger sisters: Maeve, a celebrity chef in London whose recipes Hughes presents as simultaneously silly and delectable (a "fancy fish taco" comprises "red mullet with anchovy-rosemary sauce on a cabbage leaf"); Nell, an adjunct philosophy professor at a Connecticut college; and Rhona, a hard-headed Dublin political scientist. At times, Hughes reaches for dark comedy, as when she describes how both parents ended up at the bottom of the cliff ("the heavier one reached out to grasp her—reached too far; grasped too well"). Elsewhere, she strikes an earnest note as the women reunite in Ireland and reckon with Olwen's history of alcoholism. The inconsistent tone can be jarring, but Hughes shines when weaving the dense intellectual material of the three academic sisters' work into their dialogue ("Just don't start on about the mind-body separateness of a pint of Guinness," Maeve jokes to Nell). This one perplexes and stimulates in equal measure.
