When introverted, eccentric Ethan Fawcett falls in love with the vivacious Barb, he has every reason to believe he will be delivered from a lifetime of solitude. But their relationship takes a turn for the worse when Ethan grows obsessed with providing the perfect life for their adopted 8-year-old twins, Tommy and Sam. A tour-de-force novel about love, the yearning for connection, and the ways in which childhood trauma plays out in adult life.
THE BOYS
by Katie Hafner
Spiegel & Grau, July 2022
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)
When introverted Ethan Fawcett marries Barb, he has every reason to believe he will be delivered from a lifetime of solitude. One day Barb brings home two young brothers, Tommy and Sam, for them to foster, and when the pandemic hits, Ethan becomes obsessed with providing a perfect life for the boys. Instead of bringing Barb and Ethan closer together, though, the boys become a wedge in their relationship, as Ethan is unable to share with Barb a secret that has been haunting him since childhood. Then Ethan takes Tommy and Sam on a biking trip in Italy, and it becomes clear just how unusual Ethan and his children are—and what it will take for Ethan to repair his marriage. This hauntingly beautiful debut novel—a bold and original high-wire feat—is filled with humor and surprise.
Katie Hafner writes for The New York Times, covering health care, and is the author of six non-fiction books: the memoir, Mother Daughter Me; A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano (which Kirkus called “the musical version of Seabiscuit”); The House at the Bridge: A Story of Modern Germany; Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (with Matthew Lyon); The Well: Love, Death, and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community; and Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (with John Markoff). THE BOYS is her first novel.
Silas is dead. Or he’s almost dead, felled by the trees he was felling and now brought home, comatose, to die in his unfinished, off-the-grid house at the edge of the forest he loved. His wife, Elsa, doesn’t know much about living in the country, about running the generator or chopping enough wood to survive the winter. Raising their children here, in this dwelling carved into the side of a hill, had been Silas’s dream, not hers. She doesn’t know how she’ll ease his final days with no heat and no running water. But she knows that he would want to stay here, in his bed, on his land, as his breath shudders to a whisper.
Shade and Jadis are everything to each other. They share clothes, toothbrushes, and even matching stick-and-poke tattoos. So when Shade unexpectedly joins the cheerleading team, Jadis can hardly recognize who her best friend is becoming. Shade loves the idea of falling into a group of girls; she loves the discipline it takes to push her body to the limits alongside these athletes. Most of all, Shade finds herself drawn to The Three Chloes—the insufferable trio that rules the squad—including the enigmatic cheer captain whose dark side is as compelling as it is alarming. Jadis won’t give Shade up so easily, though, and the pull between her old best friend and her new teammates takes a toll on Shade as she tries to forge her own path. So when one of the cheerleaders dies under mysterious circumstances, Shade is determined to get to the bottom of her death. Because she knows Jadis—and if her friend is responsible, doesn’t that mean she is, too?
THE PARTY YEAR is a an ekphrastic, illuminating tour de force, inspired in part by Cunningham’s own time working on the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama. In these pages, fundraising staffer David Hammond travels around the country for donor events, landing everywhere from a trailer in New Hampshire to a Beverly Hills mansion. Hammond is a keen and thoughtful observer, whose reflections on memory and history are interwoven throughout in a flowing counterpoint between past and present, the personal and the larger-than-life. Through intimate, candescent prose, THE PARTY YEAR contemplates the stories and arts that define and bring beauty to our lives.
An unnamed woman checks into a guesthouse in a mysterious district known only as the Subdivision. The guesthouse’s owners, Clara and the Judge, are welcoming and helpful, if oddly preoccupied by the perpetually baffling jigsaw puzzle in the living room. With little more than a hand-drawn map and vague memories of her troubled past, the narrator ventures out in search of a job, an apartment, and a fresh start in life. Accompanied by an unusually assertive digital assistant named Cylvia, the narrator is drawn deeper into an increasingly strange, surreal, and threatening world, which reveals itself to her through a series of darkly comic encounters reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels. A lovelorn truck driver…a mysterious child…a watchful crow. A cryptic birthday party. A baffling physics experiment in a defunct office tower where some calamity once happened. Through it all, the narrator is tempted and manipulated by the bakemono, a shape-shifting demon who poses a distinctly terrifying danger. Harrowing, meticulous, and deranged, SUBDIVISION is a brilliant maze of a novel from the writer Kelly Link has called “a master of the dark arts.” With the narrative intensity and mordant humor familiar to readers of