Table of Contents: I Married You For Happiness

Author: Lily Tuck
Publisher/Year: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011
Synopsis: Slender, potent, and utterly engaging, I Married You For Happiness combines marriage, mathematics, and the probability of an afterlife to create Tuck's most affecting and riveting book yet.

“His hand is growing cold, still she holds it” is how this novel that tells the story of a marriage begins. The tale unfolds over a single night as Nina sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Still too shocked to grieve, she lets herself remember the defining moments of their long union, beginning with their meeting in Paris. She is an artist, he a highly accomplished mathematician—a collision of two different worlds that merged to form an intricate and passionate love. As we move through select memories—real and imagined—Tuck reveals the most private intimacies, dark secrets, and overwhelming joys that defined Nina and Philip's life together.

Reviews:
The New York Times
"In this writing — purposefully fragmented, and composed with frugal economy — the characters verge toward the schematic, and the present tense in which the novel is couched increases the illusion of something light and fugitive."

Kirkus Reviews
"Here Tuck suspends time, allowing Nina, during the night ahead, to sift through the memories and images from their life together."

The Seattle Times
"In this view of marriage, set against beguiling backdrops from France to Hong Kong and placing the couple firmly within a sophisticated set, the alchemy of opposites is neither good nor bad. It's simply the stuff of which the relationship is made."

PopMatters
"Her ability to work mathematical concepts into a literary novel is impressive, as is the way numbers are pitted against life’s grayer areas, which defy quantifying."

The Washington Post
"Her new novel, as a result, is messy, reckless — a gasping and hurried labor — but imbued with enough heart that anyone who makes it past the first confounding pages will elbow ahead, trying to breathe life into the corpse."

Table of Contents: The Inheritance of Loss

Author: Kiran Desai
Publisher/Year: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006
Synopsis: In India near the Nepal border lives Jemubhai Popatlal, a retired Cambridge-educated judge. Living with him is his granddaughter Sai and his cook. Sai is 16 and has fallen in love with her 20-year old tutor, Gyan. Gyan, however, joins Nepalese independence insurgents and the group breaks into Jemubhai's home looking for weapons, terrorizing them all. Meanwhile, Biju, the son of Jemubhai's cook has illegally immigrated to New York City where his life is miserable. He tries to eke out an existence without being caught and being in an alien culture which isn't too kindly to him. It's his return home that sparks the confrontation in all their lives.

What Others Have To Say
The New York Times
"Desai's novel seems to argue that such multiculturalism, confined to the Western metropolis and academe, doesn't begin to address the causes of extremism and violence in the modern world. Nor, it suggests, can economic globalization become a route to prosperity for the downtrodden."

The Independent
"...is perhaps overlong, and on occasion digressive; its vividly painted backdrops and multiple motifs sometimes overshadow its characters."

Sydney Morning Herald
"Desai has clearly learnt the value of the pause; she allows her story to breathe. The prose is quieter, sparer and almost always beautiful."

Boston Globe
"...offers all of the pleasures of traditional narrative in a form and a voice that are utterly fresh."

Table of Contents: Halfway House

Author: Katharine Noel
Publisher/Year: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006
Synopsis: One day, Angie Voorster diligent student, all-star swimmer, and Ivy League-bound high school senior dives to the bottom of a pool and stays there. In that moment, everything the Voorster family believes they know about one another changes. Set in a small town in New Hampshire, Halfway House is the story of Angie's psychotic break and her family's subsequent turmoil. Each of her family members responds differently to the ongoing crisis: Her father Pieter, a professional cellist, retreats further into his music; her mother begins a destabilizing affair with a younger man; her younger brother, Luke, first pushes away from her then later drops out of college to be closer to her. Though the Voorsters manage for a time to maintain a semblance of the normalcy they had "before," it is not until Angie is finally able to fend for herself that the family is able to truly fall apart and then regather itself in a new, fundamentally changed way.

What Others Have To Say
The New York Times
"Noel writes Angie's manic episodes with a harrowing immediacy, but even better, she captures the fragility of her saner moments."

Entertainment Weekly
"...an overly splashy way to dramatize Angie's first psychotic break, but Noel deserves immense credit for her precise and delicate description of the grinding years that follow."

Psychiatry Online
"The author seems to be reaching for capturing the ordinary in the extraordinary, and this may be enough for some readers."

Extras
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