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Right after the Weather
Current price:
$17.00
Publication Date: August 4th, 2020
Publisher:
Washington Square Press
ISBN:
9781476747804
Pages:
288
Still North Books & Bar
1 on hand, as of Apr 28 2:12pm
On Our Shelves Now
Description
The author of the “graceful and compassionate” (People) New York Times bestseller Carry the One and “one of the best storytellers we have” (Amy Bloom, author of White Houses) presents a vividly affecting novel exploring what happens when one chance encounter forces four ordinary people to discover who they really are.
It’s the fall of 2016. Cate, a set designer in her early forties, lives and works in Chicago’s theater community. She knows it’s time to get past her prolonged adolescence and stop taking handouts from her parents. She has a firm plan to get solvent and settled in a serious relationship. She has tentatively started something new even as she’s haunted by an old, going-nowhere affair. Her ex-husband, recently booted from his most recent marriage, is currently camped out in Cate’s spare bedroom, in thrall to online conspiracy theories, and she’s not sure how to help him. Her best friend Neale, a yoga instructor, lives nearby with her son and is Cate’s model for what serious adulthood looks like.
Only a few blocks away, but in a parallel universe we find Nathan and Irene—casual sociopaths, drug addicts, and small-time criminals. Their world and Cate’s intersect the day she comes into Neale’s kitchen to find these strangers assaulting her friend. Forced to take fast, spontaneous action, Cate does something she’s never even considered. She now also knows the violence she is capable of, isolating her from everyone else in her life, and overnight, their world has changed. Together, they all grapple with their altered relationships and identities against the backdrop of the new Trump presidency and a country waking to a different understanding of itself.
“With sharply drawn characters, an ensnaring plot, and a look back at closeted gay lives, Anshaw, acutely attuned to the shifting weather of emotions and relationships, insightfully dramatizes the insistence of desire over convention and expediency and the endless reverberations of violence” (Booklist, starred review).
Praise for Right after the Weather
“Right after the Weather is about the terrifying discoveries we make—about ourselves, about the world—when the membrane separating civilization from barbarity is torn. Carol Anshaw has a genius for rendering life on the page, for characters and situations as ferociously complicated as reality. She is a master.”
— Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
“Carol Anshaw is one of the best storytellers we have. She sees all the outside and all the inside—of this difficult time we live in, of these complicated, puzzling, heart-stopping lives we lead. No one can put down an Anshaw novel and we are lucky, especially now, to have this one arrive.”
— Amy Bloom, author of White Houses
"I love the way Carol Anshaw looks at the world, her eye for people and the strangeness of the everyday. Right After the Weather is a beautiful study in light and dark contrasts, the lives of the blessed and the lives of the bleak, in the vein of Paula Fox's Desperate Characters."
— Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will
“Anshaw crafts an engaging narrative with her customary precision and tart humor. Another treat from the great Anshaw: sharply observed, unsentimentally compassionate, always cognizant of life's complexities.”
— Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"The Carry the One author is adept at finding compassion in dire circumstances, a skill she brandishes with brilliance in Right After the Weather."
— O, the Oprah Magazine
“With sharply drawn characters, an ensnaring plot, and a look back at closeted gay lives, Anshaw, acutely attuned to the shifting weather of emotions and relationships, insightfully dramatizes the insistence of desire over convention and expediency and the endless reverberations of violence.”
— Booklist, starred review
“Anshaw brings a fresh, keen voice to this story of modern lesbian life…[it] will captivate readers.”
— Publishers Weekly
