With dark humor and sharp dialogue, Homes plumbs the depths of everyday American anxieties through stories about unexpected situations.”— Time The hero of Homes’s latest novel (after Music for Torching, 1999)—a work of guarded but very real optimism and, ultimately, of redemption—is Richard Novak, a California-style Scrooge. This is the start of a sequence of events that make Raiders of the Lost Ark look like a walk through your local library. Wonderfully skewed stories . . . sharp, funny, and playful . . . Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. A fully engaged imagination [is] at work—and play.”—Amy Hempel, The Los Angeles Times

evet richard novak yahudi ebeveyniyle eh denecek çocukluk geçirmiş, her aile gibi abisiyle sıkıntıları olmuş, severek evlendiği karısından oğlu olmuş, boşanmış, o çocukla ne yapacağını bilemediğinden hiç ilgilenmemiş.This is a great Los Angeles novel and really gives you a beautiful sense of the city - from the Hills, to Malibu, to the highway culture and the natural disasters always looming in LA (mountain lions, floods, earthquakes).

Homes’s keen ear for speech—surreal as her characters’ conversations often are—lends itself to varying degrees of self-aware misunderstanding, highlighting the complexity of language and the challenges . . . The impossibility of knowing another person completely is one of life’s painful truths, and [this] collection remind us of that—but [it] also shows that there are, at least, tools available to help us try.” — Vanity Fair Is everything all right?" the girl's mother asks, arriving after the fact. "I was in the Valley. The traffic was horrible."

This sunny and disarming story is probably the last thing you would expect from Homes, whose most celebrated work, The End of Alice, is a study of paedophilia across two generations. But she is as fearless and inquisitive about the nature of kindness as she was about child abuse; if anything, this book is braver. Artists and philosophers are forever fretting over the "problem of evil". There's relatively little written about the much more interesting problem of good. Generosity can be powerfully addictive. The real-estate millionaire Zell Kravinsky, for instance, gave away his fortune and then - to the consternation of his family - tried to give away one of his kidneys. What makes us want to help strangers at our own cost and against our own interest? It isn't thanks: do-gooder is a term of abuse. Small acts of inexplicable generosity can be as alarming as they are charming. A friend of mine once found an old man bewildered and freezing in Sefton Park, spent the evening trying to find his house for him and was later arrested for attempted abduction and mugging. Richard Novak is called a freak and attention-seeker, but still keeps on. Homes is brilliant on what the attraction is. She captures the enchantment of generosity - that sense of adventure you get when you step out of your own circle of need into someone else's, and the weird feeling of invulnerability it gives you (at one point Richard ends up in a high-speed car chase with some kidnappers). Homes, whose masterful handling of suburban dystopia merits her own adjective, may have just written her midcareer magnum opus with this portrait of a flawed Nixonian bent on some sort of emotional amnesty.”—Christopher Bollen, Interview

So will this book actually save your life? Probably not. But if you read it, you will learn a few things: That it’s never too late to try again, relationships can be mended, pain can be felt and endured, that the world is full of wonderful people and wonderful experiences if only you open yourself up to the possibilities. These are things we forget when we are suffering. We tend to withdraw, hide ourselves away, retreat into ourselves and allow our pain to engulf us. For me this book was a much needed reminder that life does go on, if only you live it.Throughout the book we see Richard come to life, and there is some nice writing in their about the nature of suffering: Next time you see me, I'll be up there," he says, pointing up. He throws Richard a walkie-talkie. "We're on channel 12." Since her debut in 1989, A.M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her keen ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years.

Since finishing the novel, I’ve been working on a memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter, a portion of which appeared in The New Yorker in December 2004. It’s the story of my biological parents, who gave me up for adoption and then came looking for me when I was in my early thirties. It is in part a story of what it means to be adopted, but it is also about identity, how all of us—not just adoptees—define and construct our sense of self and our family. Yet, through all this you see him struggle with himself. His fear of dying, of not being a better son, brother, husband, father. This is what makes me just want to be in his presence, like maybe I’d catch some of what he is. I’d be tempted to use the word ‘aura’ but it might just be the Californian influence within the book, This is what made me hate to see the book end. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages and appears frequently in Art Forum, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Zoetrope. She is a Contributing Editor to Vanity Fair, Bomb and Blind Spot. Homes’s keen ear for speech—surreal as her characters’ conversations often are—lends itself to varying degrees of self-aware misunderstanding, highlighting the complexity of language and the challenges . . . The impossibility of knowing another person completely is one of life’s painful truths, and [this] collection remind us of that—but [it] also shows that there are, at least, tools available to help us try.”— Vanity FairAmericans try on the spiritual life of others like they don’t have any of their own,” Anhil says. How has the importance of the spiritual life changed over time in America? I read this in a couple of sittings, but I'm on some kind of mad reading binge right now, about a book a day, so that may not mean much. A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. Just doing some reading, let's go." Together they walk down the hill. By now the sun is entirely up, it's a beautiful day. The sky is blue and clear, the air crisp. It is as though the movie star has changed the lighting, changed the mood. The characters in this book are quirky and utterly hilarious. Set in LA, the people tend to be blunt, if not outright rude. Richard is such a likeable character, despite the fact it’s pretty clear he’s been behaving like a bit of an ass for going on ten years. But the important point is that we can see why. It makes sense, and he’s not behaving that way because he is an asshole, but because he’s afraid, and miserable and he doesn’t know what else to do. In some respects, Richard reminded me of my father. He wants to do well, but he just can’t quite figure out what it is that other people might need.