La voz literaria de Claire Lombardo está moldeada por su experiencia, incluyendo su MFA del Iowa Writers' Workshop y sus años formativos en trabajo social. Estas vivencias aportan una profunda sensibilidad a sus exploraciones de las relaciones humanas y los problemas sociales. Su obra se caracteriza por un profundo análisis de las dinámicas familiares y las intrincadas complejidades de la psique humana. Los lectores pueden esperar narrativas psicológicamente ricas y representaciones empáticas de sus personajes.
When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that awaits them. By 2016, their four radically different daughters are in a state of unrest. Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator turned stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects. With the arrival of Jonah Bendt--a child placed for adoption by one of the daughters fifteen years before--the Sorensons will be forced to reckon with the rich and varied tapestry of their past: years marred by adolescent angst, infidelity, and resentment, but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile
'Witty and insightful. A powerful exploration of marriage, motherhood, and
self' BONNIE GARMUS, author of LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY''It was such a pleasure to
bury myself in this book, a literary novel of family life which moved and
surprised me. You read on ravenously' CLARE CHAMBERS, author of SMALL
PLEASURESThe author of THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD returns with a brilliantly
observed family drama, in which a long marriage faces imminent derailment from
events both past and present At fifty-seven, Julia Ames has found herself with
an improbably lovely life. Despite her inclination towards self-sabotage, she
has a husband she loves, two happy children and a quiet, contented existence
in the suburbs.But, out of the blue, things begin to change.Her always well-
behaved son, Ben, is acting strangely, and will soon make a shocking
announcement.Her beloved but belligerent teenage daughter is about to depart
for college, leaving Julia unexpectedly terrified of an empty nest.And, in the
local grocery store, Julia encounters a woman she hasn't seen for 20 years - a
woman whose friendship was once both her lifeline and, very nearly, her
downfall.Consumed with her checkered past and the chaos of her present, Julia
starts to spin out of control, at risk of destroying all she most
loves.Following Julia over the course of a few tumultuous months, bookended by
a birthday party and a wedding, and examining the fifty-plus years before,
Same as It Ever Was examines the complete and complicated trajectory of one
woman's life and asks what it takes to make - and to not break - a
family.PRAISE FOR CLAIRE LOMBARDO: 'A literary love child of Jonathan Franzen
and Anne Tyler' GUARDIAN'Lombardo juggles a huge cast of characters with
seeming effortlessness, bringing each to life with humour, vividness and acute
psychological insight' MADELINE MILLER, author of SONG OF ACHILLES'Lombardo
has a wry, often spiky humour and tightly written style that should appeal to
fans of Maria Semple, Emma Straub and Jennifer Egan' SUNDAY TIMES
Julia Ames, after a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, has found herself on the placid plateau of mid-life. But Julia has never navigated the world with the equanimity of her current privileged class. Having nearly derailed herself several times, making desperate bids for the kind of connection that always felt inaccessible to her, she finally feels, at age fifty seven, that she has a firm handle on things. She’s unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenaged daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which threaten to draw her back into the patterns that had previously kept her on a razor’s edge. Same As It Ever Was traverses the rocky terrain of real life, —exploring new avenues of maternal ambivalence, intergenerational friendship, and the happenstantial cause-and-effect that governs us all. Delving even deeper into the nature of relationships—how they grow, change, and sometimes end—Lombardo proves herself a true and definitive cartographer of the human heart and asserts herself among the finest novelists of her generation.
Julia Ames, Ende fünfzig, scheint ein glückliches Leben zu führen, bis unerwartete Nachrichten ihrer Kinder und eine Begegnung mit einer alten Freundin ihre Welt auf den Kopf stellen. Der Roman erforscht Julias komplexe Gefühle und die entscheidenden Momente, die das Schicksal ihrer Familie beeinflussen.
