The Second Coming
A novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected May 28, 2024
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- $14.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times best-selling author of City on Fire, an intimate epic that plunges us deep into the lives of a teenage girl and her father as they navigate love, grief, betrayal, and redemption
“Beautiful and daring.” —Nathan Hill, author of Oprah’s Book Club pick Wellness
“Breathtaking.” —Christina Baker Kline, author of #1 New York Times best seller Orphan Train
When thirteen-year-old Jolie Aspern drops her phone onto the subway tracks in 2011, her estranged dad, Ethan, seems like the furthest thing from her mind. A convicted felon and recovering addict, Ethan has long struggled to see beyond himself. But then a call from New York makes him fear his daughter’s in deeper trouble than anyone realizes. And believing he’s the only one who can save her, he decides to return home.
So begins the journey that will, in time, push Jolie and Ethan—child and adult, apart and together, different yet the same—out past their depths.
Full of yearning and revelation, The Second Coming is at once an incandescent feat of storytelling and an exploration of an enduring mystery: Can the people we love ever really change?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hallberg's meandering latest (after City on Fire) traces the tentative reunion between an estranged father and his teenage daughter. It's 2011 and Ethan Aspern, a recovering heroin addict who's been in and out of prison for a series of small-time drug busts, has endured a lifetime of depression. His 13-year-old daughter, Jolie, lives with her mother, Sarah, in Upper Manhattan. When Ethan learns Jolie was nearly hit by a subway train after trying to recover her dropped phone from the tracks, he senses she's having problems of her own and vows to help set her straight. Long flashbacks elaborate on Ethan's uneven history with Sarah, his descent into addiction, and his winding path toward recovery, hobbled in part by an ingrained sense that he's not worth saving ("Talk of changed lives had the same effect on Ethan as the shibboleths of AA... which was a kind of gag reflex of solitude, like he was the last person on earth shut out of these simple doctrines of subjection and oneness and love"). A climactic Thanksgiving scene poses the question: might a repentant father and his rebellious daughter save each other? The novel is awash with gritty details and gutting emotional insights, but there's an overabundance of purple prose and the drawn-out payoff is only semirewarding. This doesn't quite scale the heights of Hallberg's breakout.
