Wreck
A Novel
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An NPR BEST BOOK OF 2025
A luminous, laugh-out-loud triumph.”—Alison Espach, author of The Wedding People
“A delight. What an absolute joy to be reunited with Rocky and her family, the characters we all fell in love with in Sandwich. Newman’s prose is laugh-out- loud funny. It’s also profound.”—J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of The Cliffs
The acclaimed bestselling author of Sandwich is back with a wonderful novel, full of laughter and heart, about marriage, family, and what happens when life doesn’t go as planned.
If you loved Rocky and her family on vacation on Cape Cod, wait until you join them at home two years later. And if this is your first meeting with this crew, get ready to laugh and cry—and relate. Rocky, still anxious, nostalgic, and funny, is living in Western Massachusetts with her husband, Nick, and their daughter, Willa, who’s back home after college. Their son, Jamie, has taken a new job in New York, and Mort, Rocky’s widowed father, has moved in.
It all couldn’t be more ridiculously normal . . . until Rocky finds herself obsessed with a local accident that only tangentially affects their family—and with a medical condition that, she hopes, won’t affect them at all.
With her signature wit and wisdom, Catherine Newman explores the hidden rules of family, the heavy weight of uncertainty, and the gnarly fact that people—no matter how much you love them—are not always exactly who you want them to be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The appealing if underdeveloped sequel to Newman's 2024 novel Sandwich follows 50-something writer Rocky through another series of midlife dilemmas. Rocky is at home in Massachusetts with her husband, Nick, and their college-grad daughter, Willa, when they read in the newspaper that an old high school friend of their son, Jamie, has been killed by a freight train at a railroad crossing. Rocky feels awful, especially after learning that the wreck might have been due to the railroad's outdated safety equipment. The episode distracts her from the article she's supposed to be writing about spatchcocking poultry, as do the inconclusive results of tests her dermatologist had her take to determine the cause of her mysterious rash, which continues to spread. Her anxiety spikes even more when she learns that the railroad is a client of the management consulting firm that Jamie works for in New York City. The plot is pretty threadbare and Newman doesn't go very far with the overarching mortality theme, but she nimbly leavens the heavy material with Rocky's quirky humor, as when she calls the fussy Willa her "princess angel baby" or struggles to fix a ceiling fan ("It's not out of the question that I'll Godzilla the entire fan out of the ceiling and throw it to the floor, screaming"). The author's fans won't be disappointed.
