Among Friends
Perfect lives hide terrible secrets in this compelling literary novel about the dark side of American wealth
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- 9,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A perfect world. But a betrayal that could shatter everything.
'Every sentence keeps you hanging in the air, waiting for the next punch to the gut' - Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace
'A hard diamond of a novel . . . I have not stopped thinking of it since' - Coco Mellors, author of Blue Sisters
For thirty years, Amos and Emerson have built a life others envy. Their wives are close, their teenage daughters have grown up together, their days are passed in the comfortable languor of New York City wealth. Their bond seems unbreakable.
This weekend, however, something is different. After gathering for Emerson’s birthday at his country home, celebration gives way to old rivalries and resentments. When tensions erupt, their finely made world is ruptured in one shocking act of violence.
In its wake, each must ask: when your world collapses, what — and who — will you sacrifice to survive?
Hal Ebbott’s Among Friends is a razor-sharp look at the dark side of American wealth, the brittle foundations of friendship, and the desperate lengths we go to to keep our secrets hidden.
‘Bracingly honest and affectingly intimate’ – The Guardian
'Assured, acutely perceptive and beautifully written’ – Financial Times
'Packs a huge emotional punch. I couldn’t put it down' – Daily Mail
‘I’m already begging my friends to read it so we can discuss the ending’ – ELLE
'Like a cold gin and tonic on a hot day' – The Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ebbott focuses his gaze on two wealthy couples in his elegant debut. Unscrupulous lawyer Emerson, who's married to dissatisfied Retsy, has been friends with psychiatrist Amos since high school, and with Amos's physician wife Claire since childhood. Their 16-year-old daughters, Anna and Sophie, have been thrown together for years but are growing apart. One October, Emerson invites Amos and his family for a weekend at his country house outside New York City. The weekend's peace is disturbed first by minor incidents—a twisted ankle, a broken bottle, a joke taken as an insult—and later by a horrifying betrayal. Months later, one character, whose life has been shattered by the events of the weekend, reveals a secret to the others, who must then decide how to handle the revelation. In refined prose that feels like a throwback to mid-20th-century psychological realism, Ebbott lays bare the many ways in which the families harm each other as each character seeks to protect the status quo of their "smooth, edgeless life." The novel's hothouse atmosphere can feel a bit static—the characters appear to exist outside of time and of any society but their own, as if released from the amber of a John Cheever story—but it's also the novel's greatest strength, as Ebbott conjures up a world where mental machinations trump morality. It's an alluring accomplishment.
