Fulfillment
A Sunday Times Summer Reads Pick
-
- 21,99 €
-
- 21,99 €
Publisher Description
'Engaging, thoughtful and bang up-to-date.' The Times
'A stone cold fox of a second novel.' PANDORA SYKES
'Fizzy dialogue and killer comic timing . . . Cole takes the temperature of modern America.' Daily Mail
You ever wake up and wonder how you got to a place?
Emmett and Joel are half-brothers, but they couldn't be more different: Emmett is single and working in a vast Cargo Distribution Centre in Kentucky, while Joel is a married academic and published writer. For the first time in years, the two of them are back together in the family home, just as Joel's wife, Alice, starts to yearn for a different kind of lifestyle.
An absorbing portrayal of three people's changing hopes and dreams, Fulfillment offers an unforgettable portrait of America today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cole (Groundskeeping) spins an evocative tale of ambition, lust, and sibling rivalry in western Kentucky. After toiling as a line cook in New Orleans, 28-year-old Emmett comes home to Paducah, where he takes a job at a massive fulfillment warehouse for an Amazon-like retailer and rents a nearby company condo. Meanwhile, his successful older half brother, Joel, and his wife, Alice, move in with Joel and Emmett's mother. Joel has published a well-received essay collection that mines his experience growing up in the South, and has just accepted a visiting lecture position at a local university. Emmett hopes to flex his own creativity as a screenwriter, despite having no connections or experience. After Alice admits to Emmett that her marriage is crumbling, the two begin an affair, and the plot ramps up further when Emmett's coworker convinces him to steal pharmaceuticals for the illegal drug market. Meanwhile, Joel plugs away at his second book and starts popping antidepressants. Cole has fun with Emmett's search for his screenplay's "hero's journey," and he writes gorgeously descriptive sentences ("the earth was darker than the sky, the pink-rimmed horizon a seam between two worlds"), but the mix of hijinks and high stakes feels tonally imbalanced. Nevertheless, this captures a colorful snapshot of contemporary Southern life.
