Reunion
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 7 May 2024
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- £9.99
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- Pre-Order
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
“Masterful storytelling and memorable characters. . . . Elise Juska's best book yet.”—Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of Long Bright River and The God of the Woods
“I loved this story about the importance of long friendships. . . . A perfectly crafted page-turner.” -Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes and The Half Moon
From the beloved author of the “uniquely poignant” (Entertainment Weekly) novel The Blessings comes a gripping story about three friends in their forties forced to reckon with their lives during a college reunion in coastal Maine.
It’s June 2021, and three old college friends are heading to New England and the twenty-fifth reunion that was delayed the year before. Hope, a stay-at-home mom, is desperate for a return to her beloved campus, a reprieve from her tense marriage, and the stresses of pandemic parenting. Adam is hesitant to leave his bucolic but secluded life with his wife and their young sons. Single mother Polly hasn’t been back to campus in more than twenty years and has no interest in returning—but changes her mind when her struggling teenage son suggests a road trip.
But the reunion isn’t what any of them had envisioned. Hope, always upbeat, is no longer able to downplay the pressures of life at home or the cracks in her longstanding friendships. Adam finds himself energized by the memory of his carefree, reckless younger self—which only reminds him how much has changed since those halcyon days. Polly cannot ignore the ghosts of her college years, including a closely guarded secret. When the weekend takes a startling turn, all three find themselves reckoning with the past—and how it will bear on the future.
Beautifully observed and insightful, Reunion is a page-turning novel about the highs and lows of friendship from a writer at the height of her powers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the appealing latest from Juska (after If We Had Known), three friends attend their 25th college reunion in Maine during the Covid-19 pandemic. Hope Richardson, now an overwhelmed stay-at-home mom with two children and a husband who is "deeply around, yet deeply absent," can't wait for a weekend away from her Philadelphia suburb. Her friends Adam Dalton and Polly Gesauldi are less convinced. Adam, late to marriage and now a father to five-year-old twin boys in New Hampshire, is concerned about leaving them with his wife, whose anxiety has worsened during quarantine. Single mother Polly is a cash-strapped and "exploited" adjunct professor in New York City and only agrees to attend the reunion when her 18-year-old son, Jacob, who's had trouble dealing with the social isolation of lockdown, asks to tag along to spend the weekend with a friend whose family has a summer house near the campus. Hijinks ensue as the Natty Light flows freely, and long-held secrets work their way to the surface. When Jacob goes missing from his friend's house and leaves behind a cryptic Instagram message, Hope, Adam, and Polly band together to find him. While some of the plot turns are predictable, the characters are well drawn, and Juska does an especially good job of portraying how her cast navigates a new normal. It's a diverting twist on the Big Chill formula.
