Swell
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Thirty years after From Rockaway ("A great first novel", Harper's Bazaar), Jill Eisenstadt returns with a darkly funny new work of fiction that exposes a city and a family at their most vulnerable.
When Sue Glassman's family needs a new home, Sue relents, after years of resisting, and agrees to convert to Judaism. In return, Sue's father-in-law, Sy, buys the family -- Sue, Dan, and their two daughters -- a capacious but ramshackle beachfront house in Rockaway, Queens, a world away from the Glassmans' cramped Tribeca apartment. The catch? Sy is moving in, too. And the house is haunted.
On the weekend of Sue's conversion party, ninety-year-old Rose, who (literally) got away with murder on the premises years earlier, shows up uninvited. Towing a suitcase-sized pocketbook, having escaped an assisted living facility in Forest Hills, Rose seems intent on moving back in. Enter neighbor Tim -- formerly Timmy (see From Rockaway), a former lifeguard, former firefighter, and reformed alcoholic -- who feels, for reasons even he can't explain, inordinately protective of the Glassmans.
The collective nervous breakdown occasioned by Rose's return swells to operatic heights in a novel that charms and surprises on every page as it unflinchingly addresses the perils of living in a world rife with uncertainty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eisenstadt's (From Rockaway) detailed and eclectic novel takes readers to a dilapidated oceanfront house full of secrets, ghosts, and an old woman's cast-off tchotchkes. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Glassmans move from their small, suddenly uninhabitable Tribeca apartment with their two daughters (and one on the way) to a Rockaway beach house, bought for them by Sue Glassman's father-in-law, Sy. To Sue's chagrin, this is on the condition that Sy move in with them and that Sue convert to Judaism. Moreover, the house is falling apart and full of the prior owner's possessions. Rose, an elderly Italian lady, shows up at their doorstep in a wheelchair demanding her house back and her garden restored. She spends multiple afternoons sitting in the Glassmans' garden, accusing them of conspiring to swindle her. Heavily pregnant, Sue wants nothing more than to be rid of the pesky former owner and her old junk. But the more Sue learns about Rose and the house, the more she comes to see how intertwined the two really are. In this touching portrait of ordinary people grappling with the aftershocks of 9/11 memorials, uncertainty, death, and a new life the emotional upheaval of a national tragedy leaves no one unaffected.
