It All Comes Down to This
A Novel
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
A tale of secrets, forgiveness, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood — from the New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Behaved Woman.
"A true page-turner." —Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful
"A smart and lively novel." —Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins
"Austenesque...this goes down as easily as an Aperol spritz." —Publishers Weekly
Meet the Geller sisters: Beck, Claire, and Sophie, a trio of strong-minded women whose pragmatic mother, Marti, will be dying soon.
Beck, a freelance journalist, suspects her husband is hiding something. Claire, an accomplished pediatric cardiologist, nurses an unrequited love that's slowly destroying her. And Sophie's Instagram-perfect life is really a cash-strapped house of cards on the verge of collapse.
Marti's will surprises them with its provision that the family's summer cottage in Maine must be sold, the proceeds split equally between the sisters. While there's a ready buyer in C.J. Reynolds, he's an ex-con with a complicated past and a tangled history with one of the women.
In It All Comes Down to This, acclaimed author Therese Anne Fowler delivers a stylish, insightful take on the dysfunctional family dramedy. As the Geller sisters navigate choices and consequences, mistakes and misapprehensions, obligations and desires, they must come to terms with the ways their lives have turned out differently than expected — and the secrets they've been keeping from each other and themselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fowler (The Good Neighborhood) returns with a smooth Austenesque tale of midlife reckoning. Matriarch Marti Geller, faced with terminal cancer, worries about her daughters. "That is what wills are for," Fowler writes, "to pull the strings you weren't able to... in life." The oldest, Beck, a freelance writer, is stuck in a sexless marriage. Claire, a cardiologist, is recently divorced and pining for a man she shouldn't be. Sophie, an art curator, is Instagram famous, but drowning in debt. Upon Marti's death, the girls are left with instructions to gather one last time at the family summer home off the coast of Maine before selling it and splitting the proceeds. In chapters from alternating points of view, Fowler skillfully captures each woman's contemporary narrative and backstory without losing the thread of time and place even as the book hopscotches through flashbacks and locales ranging from Mount Desert Island to Duluth and Dubai. At times she relies on too convenient coincidences to move the plot and the random insertions of an omniscient narrator to explain things, but the well-developed character studies keep the reader chugging along until the satisfying conclusion. Neither too complex nor too light, this goes down as easily as an Aperol spritz.
