Showing results by author "Mona Simpson" in All Categories

A national best seller upon its publication, Anywhere but Here is a moving, often comic portrait of wise child Ann August and her mother, Adele, a larger-than-life American dreamer. As they travel through the landscape of their often conflicting ambitions, Ann and Adele bring to life a novel that is a brilliant exploration of the perennial urge to keep moving, even at the risk of profound disorientation. Simpson's first novel is ultimately a heart-rending tale of a mother and daughter's invaluable relationship.

Tom Owens is a brilliant barefoot entrepreneur who has become rich and famous by inventing a new kind of business - a man who is fond of showering his largesse on friends and perfect strangers even as he resists any deeper claims on his affection. Into Owens's charmed life comes a 10-year-old girl whose claims he cannot ignore: Jane is his daughter, born out of wedlock, raised in communes, and now dispatched into his care by a mother who is no longer capable of providing it.

When Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from Los Angeles to college at UC Berkeley, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep depression. A single mother who maintains a wishful belief that her children can attain all the things she hasn’t, she’s worked hard to secure their future in caste-driven 1980s Los Angeles, gaining them illegal entry to an affluent public school. When she enters a state hospital, her closest friend tries to keep the children safe and their mother’s dreams for them alive.

In Green Bay, Wisconsin - here vividly realized and imagined - Bea Maxwell comes of age in the 50s, and Off Keck Road follows her extended circle along the arc of their lives, through their frustrations and occasional successes, well toward old age. A story of family and friends, of change and many generations, it gathers itself around this remarkable woman, who discovers much about the world from her experience in the one place she has always belonged. Mesmerizing, compact, and intense, Off Keck Road reflects fully half a century of American life.

Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to LA so her husband can follow his dream of writing TV comedy. With Paul working all hours and Claire left with a baby, William, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for, they hire Lola - a 52-year-old mother of five who works in America to pay for her own children's education back in the Philippines. Lola stabilizes the rocky household, and other parents try to lure her away. What she sacrifices to stay with Claire and William remains her own secret.

All you have to do to become somebody’s God is disappear." The speaker is Mayan Atassi, the wise and frighteningly vulnerable heroine who captivated readers of Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here and who now narrates the novel’s immensely powerful successor. Mayan’s god is her father, who left her when she was a child. Up until now she has worshiped him by waiting for him to come back. But at the age of 28 Mayan sets out to find him. Her quest is an epic, wrenching search that leads her across two continents to the high edge of madness.

From the acclaimed and award-winning author of Anywhere But Here and My Hollywood, a powerful new novel about a young boy’s quest to uncover the mysteries of his unraveling family. What he discovers turns out to be what he least wants to know: the inner workings of his parents’ lives. And even then he can’t stop searching.