The Displacements
When a storm threatens to destroy everything, where do you run?
-
- £3.99
Publisher Description
'Hypnotic' New York Times
'A gripping, full-throttle page-turner' Miranda Cowley Heller, bestselling author of The Paper Palace
Daphne Larsen-Hall has every reason to believe that her life as an artist in a luxury Miami house with her surgeon husband, Brantley, and their children, will carry on forever.
But Luna - the world's first Category 6 hurricane - changes everything. With Brantley missing, and their finances abruptly cut off, the family find themselves in a vast shelter for the displaced a thousand miles from home.
As days turn into weeks, the Larsen-Halls confront losses and circumstances they never imagined, and a world changed beneath their feet. But when tensions in the shelter reach a breaking point, and shocking truths threaten to tear her family apart, Daphne's resilience is put to the ultimate test.
'Tense, claustrophobic, and all too imaginable' Diane Chamberlain
'Riveting' Mary Beth Keane
Praise for Bruce Holsinger's The Gifted School:
'More than a touch of Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies' Observer
'An incisive inspective of privilege, race and class' New York Times
'Snapping with tension, this is a book for our times' Shari Lapena
'Exposes how easily a mix of good intentions, self-delusions and minor sins can escalate' The New Yorker
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Holsinger's harrowing novel of environmental disaster (after The Gifted School), an unprecedented category 6 hurricane obliterates Miami and disrupts a once-charmed family. Before the storm hits, Daphne Larsen-Hall has a great life—pampered wife of a wealthy surgeon, with a two-million-dollar home in Coral Gables and two bright children, Oliver and Mia. But after Hurricane Luna, Daphne's life is upended. Homeless and penniless due to a cascading series of setbacks, she and the children end up evacuated to a megashelter in Oklahoma run by no-nonsense FEMA official Rain Holton. There, among 10,000 other evacuees, her sullen stepson Gavin falls under the spell of two drug dealers and Mia becomes obsessed with playing a kids' game called Range. Then, after the final indignity of losing her wedding and engagement rings, Daphne decides to become an art teacher in the camp. Two months in, many evacuees have formed "ethnic enclaves," including one called Crackertown, which Holsinger describes as a "dark edge of pride in self-designation." Then Rain contends with a new weather emergency threatening the shelter. Holsinger does a good job exploring the country's cultural and economic divisions and the effects of climate change, and is even better with the characters and their ever-mounting problems. This story of displacement and desperation packs a wallop.
