From the best-selling author Joe Meno, a moving novel about the impossibility of fate and family
As in all his tender and edgy fiction, Meno’s poetic prose is infused with sweet compassion and sharp protest as he marvels over ‘the beautiful failure of all human beings struggling against their own glorious mistakes’ while, somehow, finding a way forward. -Booklist, starred review
[D]espite the long odds stacked against his characters, Meno keeps their story buoyant …They’re hopelessly optimistic in their own twisted way … What this story gets so right is how so many of us live in the past and the present all at once. -Chicago Reader
Joe Meno writes with a humor and tenderness that sometimes doesn’t feel made for this bleak hour of history … Or. Maybe it’s exactly what we need right now? … Meno reminds us that though family’s do, in fact, fuck you up, sometimes they’re the only thing that can put you back together.
-Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2022
Aleksandar and Isobel are siblings and former classical music prodigies, once destined for greatness. As the only Eastern European family growing up on their block on the far southside of Chicago, the pair were inseparable until each was forced to confront the absurdity of tragedy at an early age and abandon their musical ambitions.
Now in their twenties, they find themselves encountering ridiculous jobs, unfulfilling romantic relationships, and the outrageousness of ordinary life. Doomed by fate, a family history of failure, an odd mother, an absent father, and a younger brother with a peculiar fondness for catastrophes, the two siblings have all but given up.
But when an illness forces Isobel and her three-year-old daughter to move back into the family home, Aleks becomes deeply involved in the endless challenges that surround his relatives. Once Isobel begins playing cello again, Aleks comes to see a world of possibility and wonder in the lives of his extraordinarily complicated family.
Told in Aleks’s exuberant voice, and full of as much comedy as tragedy, this entertaining novel asks, Is it ever truly possible to separate our fates from those we’ve come to love?
