New World Monkeys
A Novel
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A savagely smart, darkly comic literary debut, New World Monkeys exposes the false idols of marital tranquillity, small-town idyll, and corporate Darwinism in the dazzling voice of a major new talent.
Duncan and Lily, young and adrift in a prickly marriage and lackluster careers, flee Manhattan for the peaceful allure of a recently inherited crumbling Victorian home. But the two are left with little time to ponder the traditional "he said, she said" failings of a relationship: On an upstate road miles shy of their house, a wild boar leaps to his death in front of their Saab–an accident whose consequences will haunt them throughout the summer.
That was no ordinary hog.
Lily and Duncan arrive in the eccentric town of Osterhagen to discover the boar had a name: The Sovereign of the Deep Wood. That it was the town mascot. And, as the hapless urbanites are coerced into the vortex of tea socials, cannon fire, and communal history, they realize that the residents of the bizarre hamlet intend to seek justice for their fallen hero.
Next come the bones.
Duncan, an adman whose controversial new campaign could make or break his career, wants a temporary escape from the pressures of urban life. But his pastoral retreat darkens when an attempt at gardening turns up a human femur in the lawn, a headstone inscribed simply Tinker, 1902, and a sense that Lily’s family may have violence in its aristocratic blood.
And then there’s Lloyd.
Lily, conflicted about her marriage and her career, spends her days at the local library researching her impossibly arcane dissertation topic but can’t seem to make any progress. One day she observes the town pervert in action and befriends him.
Lloyd, a Peeping Tom, invites her to follow him on a bird’s-eye tour of Osterhagen that may help her home in on her own flaws and failings.
Keep digging.
Thrown together in their complicity over the boar’s death, fueled to exhume Tinker’s bones from the garden, and inspired by Lloyd’s philosophical savoir faire, Duncan and Lily begin to excavate the profound truth about themselves and their marriage. But how deep can the two dig before the summer’s violent beginning catches up with them?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this unabashedly eccentric debut, a young couple with a troubled marriage make the fateful decision to summer in a decaying upstate New York house, leading to a series of bizarre events. First, their car slams into a wild boar, and Lily, seeing it squealing in pain, smashes its skull with a tire iron. But when the two arrive in town, they realize the boar Sovereign of the Deep Wood was the town mascot and the beloved pet of a nasty local named Skinner, who is eager to find the culprits. Then Duncan uncovers a gravestone and a human bone in the house's backyard, and the two barely speaking spouses excavate the skeleton and ponder a decades-old whodunit. Meanwhile, ad-man Duncan commutes back and forth to the city and struggles with a campaign that could make or break his career, while Ph.D.-thesis avoidant Lily befriends the town pervert. As the intrigues heighten to an absurd degree, the question of whether Duncan and Lily will reforge their bond in the midst of the macabre goings-on catapults the book to a surreally satisfying climax. It's fun, funny and touching a great summer book.
Customer Reviews
Wonderful Read
Did not put it down, spectacular ending!