The Nest meets The Vacationers in this novel of family dysfunction in which, for the Brights, normal has become whatever their crazy family says it is.
When the four adult sons of recently retired senator John Bright, and their significant others, join their parents at the family’s Berkshire compound for their mandatory summer vacation, the matriarch Patty decides to hire a documentary filmmaker to memorialize their time together. The Brights, a family of outsized pride, are beautiful, competitive, athletic, and terrible … They have everything they need, except the ability to see themselves clearly. Naturally, they let their guard down.
Caught up in the news of the day, the senator misses being in the limelight and so he floats, at least on camera, another political run, this time for governor. That is, until one by one family secrets start coming to light. And keep coming …
For fans of Megan Abbott and Chris Bohjalian comes a novel of moral complexity about friends who must choose between self-preservation and doing the right thing in the wake of a fatal boating accident. Set in the moody off-season of Martha's Vineyard, Everything That Follows is a plunge into the dark waters of secrets and flexible morals.
The truth becomes whatever we say it is...
Around midnight, three friends take their partying from bar to boat on a misty fall evening. Just as the weather deteriorates, one of them suddenly and confusingly goes overboard. Is it an accident? The result of an unwanted advance? His body disappears quickly, silently, into the dark water. The circumstances are murky, but what is clear is that the other two need to notify the authorities. Minutes become hours become days as they hesitate, caught up in their guilt and hope that their friend has somehow made it safely to shore. As valuable time passes, they find themselves deep in a moral morass with huge implications as they struggle to move forward and live with their dark secret.
We Are Unprepared is a novel about the next big storm, the one that changes our relationship to nature and each other...the superstorm that threatens to destroy a marriage, a rural Vermont town and the Eastern Seaboard when it hits. But the destruction begins months earlier, when fear infects people's lives and spreads like a plague.
Ash and Pia's move from Brooklyn to the bucolic hills of Vermont was supposed to be a fresh start a picturesque farmhouse, mindful lifestyle, maybe even children. But just three months in, news breaks of a devastating superstorm expected in the coming months. Fear of the impending disaster divides their tight-knit rural town and exposes the chasms in Ash and Pia's marriage. Ash seeks common ground with those who believe in working together for the common good. Pia teams up with preppers who want to go off the grid and war with the rest of the locals over whom to trust and how to protect themselves. Where Isole had once been a town of old farm families, yuppie transplants and beloved rednecks, they divide into paranoid preppers, religious fanatics and government tools.
We Are Unprepared is an emotional journey, a terrifying glimpse into the human, environmental and cultural costs of our changing earth.
But hope awaits on the other side.
