Bottle Grove
A Novel
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A razor-sharp tale of two couples, two marriages, a bar, and a San Francisco start-up from a best-selling, award-winning novelist.
This is a story about two marriages. Or is it? It begins with a wedding, held in the small San Francisco forest of Bottle Grove--bestowed by a wealthy patron for the public good, back when people did such things. Here is a cross section of lives, a stretch of urban green where ritzy guests, lustful teenagers, drunken revelers, and forest creatures all wait for the sun to go down. The girl in the corner slugging vodka from a cough-syrup bottle is Padgett--she's keeping something secreted in the woods. The couple at the altar are the Nickels--the bride is emphatic about changing her name, as there is plenty about her old life she is ready to forget.
Set in San Francisco as the tech-boom is exploding, Bottle Grove is a sexy, skewering dark comedy about two unions--one forged of love and the other of greed--and about the forces that can drive couples together, into dependence, and then into sinister, even supernatural realms. Add one ominous shape-shifter to the mix, and you get a delightful and strange spectacle: a story of scheming and yearning and foibles and love and what we end up doing for it--and everyone has a secret. Looming over it all is the income disparity between San Francisco's tech community and . . . everyone else.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Handler's latest novel for adults (following All the Dirty Parts) is a hilarious tale about unlikely couples set during the San Francisco dot-com explosion. Martin is a 30-year-old co-owner of Bottle Grove bar when he meets Padgett, a woman with a trust fund, sharp wit, and a drinking problem, while they're both working a wedding for Rachel and Ben, and soon become a couple. The wedding ends with a bang when the significant other of Reynard, who is pretending to be a vicar, confronts Reynard about his infidelity and Reynard crashes his car trying to escape her. After the wedding, Martin and his business partner need cash to keep their bar open, and Martin hatches a plan that involves Padgett meeting tech tycoon Vic and enchanting him to get money out of him. Padgett, not in on the scheme, realizes what Martin's doing after becoming involved with Vic, a complicated and famous man with plenty of secrets. Meanwhile, Rachel and Ben are still married, but she's feeling restless and unsettled while Reynard lurks around her, biding his time to seduce her. Handler cleverly exposes the sinister sides of his protagonists as they clamor for what they think they deserve. Readers expecting Handler's trademark humor and bite won't be disappointed.
