Description de l’éditeur
‘Beautiful … Incredibly moving’ ANN PATCHETT
‘Sun-saturated prose’ GOOD HOUSEKEEPING
‘A rich tale you can’t put down’ iNEWS
‘Deeply satisfying … beautifully written’ POLLY SAMSON
A family secret. A new love. The chance to start again.
Margaret's childhood is one of Saturday morning pancakes and sunlit swimming pools behind white picket fences. Then, one fateful summer, everything changes. A line is crossed and the simple pleasures of girlhood slip away.
Twenty-five years later, Margaret is newly divorced with two young daughters of her own. She's starting over while discovering the pleasures of a new boyfriend. But, returning to the family home at her mother's beckoning, she finds herself swept up in the unspoken truth of that long ago summer. She must now reckon with what binds the past to the present, one generation to the next, and safety to the freedom we most desire.
A must-read novel of the summer in Sunday Times Style, Elle and Good Housekeeping.
‘Jones takes her cues from writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf’ NEW YORK TIMES
‘A moving, funny and searing look at childhood, family and marriage. I adored it’ CHRIS WHITAKER, author of All the Colours of the Dark
‘Shattering, but also witty, arch, probing and hopeful’ PANDORA SYKES, in Sunday Times Style
‘An unsettling narrative of family secrets and buried wounds’ ELLE
'Thrillingly virtuosic – beguiling, unsettling and stylish’ JESSICA STANLEY, author of Consider Yourself Kissed
About the author
Honor Jones is a senior editor at The Atlantic and formerly at the New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jones delves into the shame and secrets that drove a woman apart from her mother in this sharp debut. When Margaret was 10, she began to fear bedtime because of uncomfortable touches from her 13-year-old brother, Neal. Making matters worse, she was afraid to tell their elegant and commanding mother, Elizabeth, who was often cruel to her. Now, 25 years later, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Margaret co-parents her two daughters, ages eight and four, with her ex-husband in Brooklyn. She tries to keep her daughters safe by gently asking them to reveal their worries to her, but they are either tight-lipped or carefree. Meanwhile, she keeps her own painful childhood at arm's length, even as she commissions stories of sexual assault and harassment for the magazine she edits. When her older daughter, Jo, asks for a pool party at Elizabeth's house for her birthday, Margaret readies herself to return to the home she's long avoided. Jones dials up the family tension in quotidian scenes and, through laughter and heartache, lays bare the dysfunction Margaret's fought to escape. Readers will find much to admire in this intelligent story of trauma bubbling to the surface.
