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Familiar

Familiar

by JRobertLennon (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 2013

    $3.39
Synopsis

Elisa Brown is driving back from her annual visit to her son Silas's grave. The road is flat and featureless, and so she finds herself focussing on an old crack in her windscreen. For a moment, she loses sense of all else around her. When she comes back to herself, everything has changed. The car she is driving is not the same car. Her body is more subtly changed. She's wearing different clothes. But a name badge pinned to her blouse tells her she's still Elisa Brown. When she arrives home, her life is familiar-but different. There is her house, her husband. But in the world she now inhabits, Silas is no longer dead, and his brother is disturbingly changed. Elisa has a new job, and her marriage seems sturdier, and stranger. Has she had a psychotic break? Or has she entered a parallel universe? She soon discovers that these questions hinge on being able to see herself as she really is-something that might be impossible for Elisa, or for anyone.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 224
 Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Published: 08 Aug 2013
ISBN 10: 1846689473
ISBN 13: 9781846689475
Book Overview: A woman's life becomes a mystifying puzzle in this electrifying experimental thriller

Media Reviews
J. Robert Lennon's beautifully written new novel bristles with menace and suspense - a terrific and disturbing read * Daily Mail *
This highly convincing nightmare reads like a thriller; Lennon is painfully truthful about grief and parenthood -- Kate Saunders * Times *
Tight in focus as well as in construction...an otherworldly narrative -- Leo Robson * Evening Standard *
Dazzling -- Justine Jordan * Guardian *
A writer with enough electricity to light up the country -- Ann Patchett
A literary puzzle, a marvelous trick of the mind...as tightly wound as a great Alfred Hitchcock movie. * LA Times *
So breakneck and harrowing, so grab-you-by-the-lapels astonishing, that you may not notice until nearly the end how many questions about your own life it makes you ask. -- Elizabeth McCracken
A novel that imposes itself on the imagination from the opening sentences ... Lennon's brisk prose is both vivid and precise; the dialogue is clear and authentic, often funny. In fact, considering that this is a deadly serious, often bewildering and affecting novel, Familiar is witty and satiric. It is obvious that its genius lies in Lennon's feel for metaphysical contradictions that consistently undercut the realism ... a similar approach to the theme of parallel universes and altered experiences within shifting time frames has also been explored in novels such as Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 or Tom McCarthy's Remainder, neither of which achieves the unsettling mastery of Lennon's far shorter and infinitely superior novel, which could inspire a brilliant screenplay ... Familiar is fresh and original; it is also disturbing in its strangeness, because that strangeness is eerily real -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times *
The direct present-tense narration and instantly engaging plight prove an irresistible combination...One of the clever things about the set-up here is how neatly it invigorates some of drearier procedures of conventional fiction...a meditation on family and identity likely to stir brain and heart alike -- Anthony Cummins * Observer *
Lennon is an American writer whose novels delicately probe the psychology of their protagonists...In Familiar Lennon uses his sci-fi vehicle to create eerie fiction. The notion of parallel universes becomes a metaphor for life choices and their results...immersion in her alternate realities prompts reflection upon the aleatory nature of our own life, in all its uncanniness -- Peter Carty * Independent on Sunday *
Author Bio
J. Robert Lennon is the author of seven novels. His fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, Harper's Magazine, the New Yorker and the LRB. He lives in upstate New York.