The Survivors
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Years ago, they fled the lake house.
Now, the brothers have returned.
Three brothers return to the family cottage by the lake where, more than two decades earlier, a catastrophe changed the course of their lives. Now, they are here to scatter their mother's ashes - young men, estranged but bound together by the history that defines them. Their lives have been spent competing for their father's favour and their mother's love, in a household more like a minefield than a home. What really happened that summer day when everything was blown to pieces?
The Survivors is a suspenseful, haunting novel about three brothers and their reckoning with the events of one disputed, disastrous summer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Author and TV journalist Schulman's searing if simplistic English-language debut follows three adult brothers as they wrestle with the legacy of a tragedy that upended their childhoods over 20 years earlier. After their mother's death from stomach cancer, Benjamin, Nils, and Pierre reunite to take her ashes to a cabin in rural Sweden where they often stayed as children. It is an emotionally fraught place for the boys: while their adventures there drew them close, it's laden with memories of their parents' fickle moods—their father, at turns doting and wrathful; their mother, loving and cruel. Benjamin, calm and observant, narrates, and attempts to hold together the mercurial and aloof Nils. Schulman teases out the story's central mystery slowly, alternating chapters between Benjamin's memories and the brothers' haphazard reunion. Schulman writes in an understated prose and has an intuitive feel for the subtleties of gesture and memory. While the conclusion's revelation of the incident that sundered the family feels a bit too clean, the author's skills with character development are undeniable. Schulman shows he has plenty of talent to burn.
