Breakable You by Brian Morton - Main

Adam Weller is a middle-aged novelist, past his prime, but squiring around a much younger woman and still longing for greater fame and glory. His former wife Eleanor is unhappily playing the role of the discarded, overweight woman. Their fragile perennial-student daughter Maud has just begun a frankly sexual affair with Samir, an Arab American.

Into these lives the past intrudes in a way that will test them to their core. Adam recieves an appeal from the widow of his literary mentor and rival when she finds a manuscript that may be a lost masterpiece. As Maud draws closer to Samir, she discovers an unexpected obstacle: Samir is still in mourning for his young daughter, whose death remains the central fact of his existence. And Eleanor is suddenly contacted by Patrick, her first love whom she abandoned for the larger, brighter life Adam seemed to promise. By the novel’s end, all of these characters will be forced to stare at the truth of their lives and make choices that will define their essential natures.

Brian Morton is the author of three previous novels, The Dylanist, Starting Out in the Evening, and A Window Across the River, and was a recipient of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Starting Out in the Evening won the Koret Jewish Book Award for fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award. A Window Across the River was a Today Book Club pick. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University.

Breakable You
Brian Morton

Hardcover, $25.00

ISBN:
0-15-101192-3
ISBN13/EAN:
978-0-15-101192-6

available at:

“Some say that love has become too easy, in this era of no-fault divorce and serial monogamy, to make a good subject for novels anymore, but off in his own corner of the literary kingdom, Brian Morton is quietly proving them wrong.”

—Salon

“For some readers, Brian Morton may still be an undiscovered treasure. He won’t be for long.”

—Newsday

“Brian Morton is some strange kind of magician; his novels have the luminous transparency of a great city at twilight.”

—The Palm Beach Post

“Ambition run amok, sexual hunger, the mixed pleasures and terrors of being a parent, all are played out against the intellectually engaging (and bitterly funny) world that Morton portrays so acutely in his fiction. This is such a complex and satisfying book, I truly hated the come to the end of it.”

—Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After

“Breakable You gives us a brilliant cast of cranky, sublimely self-conscious characters and puts them in the path of unspeakable loss and great joy. The story has its own dry ironies and knows that the heartless often prosper, and yet it keeps showing us at every turn people falling into braver in spite of themselves. A remarkable novel.”

—Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven