A Signed First Edition Club Recommendation
"In Gone So Long, his first novel in ten years, Dubus tells the story of three people dealing with the pain and heartache of a tragedy from many years before. We see the stories of Susan, a forty-year-old professor who struggles with the trauma; Daniel, Susan's father who impulsively killed her mother when she was three; and Lois, the maternal grandmother who raised Susan, and who is stuck in anger and bitterness. The novel moves from the New England coast to Florida, and there is palpable tension as their lives intersect once more. Dubus has woven a story of darkness and compassion—never falling into sentimentality—that leaves us in awe of his writing and his humanity."
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date 2018-10-02
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780393244106
Andre Dubus III’s first novel in a decade is a masterpiece of thrilling tension and heartrending empathy.
Few writers can enter their characters so completely or evoke their lives as viscerally as Andre Dubus III. In this deeply compelling new novel, a father, estranged for the worst of reasons, is driven to seek out the daughter he has not seen in decades.
Daniel Ahearn lives a quiet, solitary existence in a seaside New England town. Forty years ago, following a shocking act of impulsive violence on his part, his daughter, Susan, was ripped from his arms by police. Now in her forties, Susan still suffers from the trauma of a night she doesn’t remember, as she struggles to feel settled, to love a man and create something that lasts. Lois, her maternal grandmother who raised her, tries to find peace in her antique shop in a quaint Florida town but cannot escape her own anger, bitterness, and fear.
Cathartic, affirming, and steeped in the empathy and precise observations of character for which Dubus is celebrated, Gone So Long explores how the wounds of the past afflict the people we become, and probes the limits of recovery and absolution.
