All things cease to appear : a novel
Record details
- ISBN: 9781101875605
- ISBN: 1101875607
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Physical Description:
electronic resource
remote
1 online resource - Edition: First edition.
- Publisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.
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Subject: | Cold cases (Criminal investigation) -- Fiction Criminal investigation -- Fiction Cold cases (Criminal investigation) Criminal investigation |
Genre: | Downloadable e-Books Electronic books. Fiction. |
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Electronic resources
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2015 December #2
*Starred Review* Readers know at the outset of Brundage's (A Stranger like You, 2010) cunning psychological thriller that Catherine Clare has been savagely murdered and suspect, if they don't know for certain, that the crime was committed by her husband, George. What follows is a crafty dissection of the dissolution of a marriage that was doomed from the start. Ill-suited opposites, Catherine and George only marry when Catherine becomes pregnant. An art historian who never completed his doctoral dissertation and never owned up to this lapse, George lands a plum position at a tony private college in the Hudson River Valley. Small-town reticence coupled with rural isolation provide further challenges to their shaky union, and a series of inexplicable and unsolved crimes only add to the uneasiness of Catherine's life in their impoverished farmhouse, where the previous owners committed suicide. As she builds the case against the sociopathic husband, Brundage also constructs a dynamic portrait of a young woman coming into her own at the fringe of the 1970s feminist movement and implicates a destructively self-protective community that fails to seek justice. Brundage's account of a marriage in free fall will, inevitably, be compared to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (2012), even as it rises to greater literary heights and promises a soaring mix of mysticism, mayhem, and madness. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews. - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 2016 March
The aftershocks of lossBookPage Fiction Top Pick, March 2016
On a bleak, harsh winter afternoon in Chosen, a small town in upstate New York, local art history professor George Clare comes home to find his 3-year-old daughter, Franny, hiding in fear and his wife, Catherine, murdered. George becomes the chief suspect, and the investigation turns up details about his personal lifeâsecret relationships, temper issues, a disintegrating marriageâthat cast his innocence in doubt for everyone but his closest family. Still, the police investigating remain unable to pin his wife's murder on George, and the crime goes unsolved for decades.
Death seems to hang over Chosen; the town is rural, close-knit and poor, with a dark historyâthe Clares' own house was the site of a suicide not long before the family moved in. The community struggles not only to understand who killed Catherine, but also how and why. Years will passâand Franny Clare will have to return to her childhood home, now long abandonedâbefore any justice is found.
In her third novel, Elizabeth Brundage, who has an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, combines a classic murder mystery with a gripping psychological thriller, exploring the complexities of grief, relationshipsâromantic, familial and friendlyâand small-town life. All Things Cease to Appear is a smart, original take on the mystery genre, with nuanced depictions of rural New York, the people who inhabit it and the secrets they keep.
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This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Copyright 2012 BookPage Reviews. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2016 January #1
You get in your car, drive to work, park, and go inside. An ordinary dayâexcept, back at home, someone is chopping your wife to bits, the opening gambit in Brundage's (A Stranger Like You, 2010, etc.) smart, atmospheric thriller. Here's the thing about creepy old farmhouses: they're full of ghosts, and ax murderers lurk in the tree line. Art history professor George Clare is a rational fellow, but when he moves into the country to teach at a small-town college, he finds his colleagues making odd assumptions: since he knows a thing or two about Swedenborg, then he must be game for a séance. Catherine, his young wife, whose "beauty did not go unnoticed" even out among the yokels, has long since sunk into a quiet depression. They have problems. She doesn't live long enough to grow to hate the country, though she senses early on that the place they've bought from a foreclosed-on local family is fraught with supernatural danger: "Until this house," she thinks, "she'd ne ver thought seriously of ghosts, at all. Yet, as the days passed, their existence wasn't even a question anymoreâshe just knew." Yup. Question is, who would do her in, leaving a single grim witness, the terrified daughter? There's no shortage of suspects on the mortal plane, to say nothing of the supernatural. Part procedural, part horror story, part character study, Brundage's literate yarn is full of telling moments: George is like a "tedious splinter" in Catherine's mind, while George dismisses her concerns that maybe they shouldn't be living in a place where horrible things have happened with, "As usual, you're overreacting." But more, and better, Brundage carries the arc of her story into the future, where the children of the nightmare, scarred by poverty, worry, meth, Iraq, are bound up in its consequences, the weight of all those ghosts, whether real or imagined, upon them forever. With a storyline that tightens like a constrictor, this is a book that you won't w ant to read alone late at night. Copyright Kirkus 2015 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2016 March #1
Art history professor George Clare comes home to his upstate New York farmhouse to find Catherine, his wife, murdered and their toddler daughter alone in her room. Instead of the traditional whodunit path, however, Brundage takes the reader back in time to reveal what led to this devastating event. It's not just a history of the Clares and their move from Manhattan to a depressed rural town; it's about their neighbors, George's free-spirited colleagues, and the boys who perform odd jobs around the property. Each person connected to the family has their own story and perspective, and the author elegantly shifts among them all until the truth comes into focus. In examining the inconsistency of memory, Brundage plays with how things look vs. how things actually are. The structure of her transcendent work allows readers to see how characters experience events in the moment, reflect upon them later, and then examine them years after the fact. VERDICT Tragedy leaves an indelible mark on both people and places in Brundage's (A Stranger Like You) piercing new novel. Part mystery, part ghost story, and entirely brilliant, this title will entrance book clubs and literary fiction readers.âLiza Oldham, Beverly, MA
[Page 91]. (c) Copyright 2016 Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2015 December #2
Brundage's (bestselling author of The Doctor's Wife) searing, intricate novel epitomizes the best of the literary thriller, marrying gripping drama with impeccably crafted prose, characterizations, and imagery. In 1978, Ella and Calvin Hale respond to their farm's failing fortunes by committing suicide. As their sons, Eddy, Cole, and Wade, are taken in by nearby relatives, their farmhouse in upstate Chosen, N.Y., is bought by outsiders. College professor George Clare, his beautiful wife, Catherine, and their toddler, Franny, buy the house and seem picture-perfect, but appearances deceive. George, an expert in Hudson River painter George Inness (an actual figure, whose artistic theories and Swedenborg-influenced philosophy run through the novel) is a dark soul with a young mistress and a violent history; insecure Catherine takes his abuse until the women's movement helps empower her to leave him. Then George appears at a neighbor's door, announcing that he has found Catherine murdered in their bedroom. Though locals blame him, the crime remains unsolved. Seen as cursed and haunted by its dark history, their house sits abandoned until 2004, when Franny, now a surgical resident, re-encounters painful memories and her former babysitter Cole Hale on a trip to empty it. Moving fluidly between viewpoints and time periods, Brundage's complex narrative requires and rewards close attention. Succeeding as murder mystery, ghost tale, family drama, and love story, her novel is both tragic and transcendent. Agent: Linda Chester, Linda Chester Literary Agency. (Mar.)
[Page ]. Copyright 2015 PWxyz LLC