A profound debut novel that explores complicated love, secrets, and familial misunderstandings from the celebrated octogenarian author of the “trail-blazing” (
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) collection
Cat Brushing
During the week of Dr. Agnes Stacey’s daughter’s wedding, each of the eleven attendees in the small family gathering brings their own simmering tensions. Agnes’s uncle, Professor Malcolm Miller, has harbored a family secret since Agnes’s parents died in a car crash when she was a young girl. Dr. Joseph Bradshaw, who married into the family, has nursed a private obsession with Agnes since his brief stint as her therapist. Agnes herself is returning to her ex-husband’s home for the first time, just as she’s trying to extricate herself from a potent new love affair. Each one of these three has the tools to analyze the love lives of others, yet find themselves challenged to recognize the love in their own lives. As they all emerge from painful years in emotional isolation, Malcolm considers where better to lay bare the failures and secrets of one’s advancing age than at an intimate celebration of love?
In this incisive and lively novel, Campbell parses the inner lives of ordinary people doing their best to process aftershocks of war, the parenting they do and don’t receive, and the many different forms love can take in one family.