About the Book
In this gripping, gorgeous literary drama, two suburban families are hopelessly entangled during an explosive Thanksgiving weekend that changes their lives forever.
When Benjamin's wife kicks him out of their house, he returns to his childhood home in Connecticut to live with his widowed father. Lost, lonely, and doubting everything he felt he knew about marriage and love--even as his eighty-year-old father begins to date again--Benjamin is trying to put his life back together when he recognizes someone down the street: his high school crush, the untouchable Audrey Martin. Audrey has just moved to the neighborhood with her high-powered lawyer husband and their rebellious teenage daughter, Emily. As it turns out, Audrey isn't so untouchable anymore, and she and Benjamin begin to discover, in each other's company, answers to many of their own deepest longings. Meanwhile, as the neighborhood is wracked by a mysterious series of robberies, Audrey seems to be hiding a tragic secret, her husband becomes involved in a dangerous professional game he can never win, and, by the way, who is paying attention to Emily?
Powerful, provocative, and psychologically gripping, Housebreaking explores the ways in which two families--and four lives--can all too easily veer off track, losing sight of everyone and everything they once held dear. Like the best from Tom Perotta and Rick Moody, who capture the darker truths of modern suburban life, this literary triumph from an immensely talented writer offers an insightful, funny, and terrifyingly authentic portrait of modern suburban life that reveals how little we know of one another's lives.
About the Author :
Dan Pope has published short stories in Post Road, McSweeney's, Crazyhorse, Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, Witness, the Iowa Review, and many other publications. He graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2002, which he attended on a Truman Capote fellowship, and where he won the Glenn Schaeffer Award and the John Leggett Prairie Lights Fiction Prize. The author of In the Cherry Tree, Pope lives in Connecticut.
Hillary Huber is one of the most successful voice talents in Los Angeles. Recent books read for Blackstone Audio include Him, Her, Him Again, the End of Him by Patricia Marx, A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read, and A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart.
Tom Taylorson is an Earphones Award-winning narrator and Chicago-based actor with over a decade of stage experience. In that time he also built a voice-over career and now primarily works as a voice actor. Tom is an adjunct faculty member at Columbia College Chicago, teaching voice-over for interactive media.
Review :
"Housebreaking looks behind the facade of a suburban neighborhood and tells the truth about love and lust, marriage and family, youth and aging, grief and loss...Dan Pope is a writer of extraordinary insight, wit, and heart."
-- "Jennifer Haigh, author of Faith"
"A necessary American novel of rare beauty and power."
-- "William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark"
"Compassionate, utterly engrossing...This insightful novel about flawed people and their frequent quests for redemption makes some trenchant points about how easily people can lose sight of what's most important."
-- "Booklist"
"Dan Pope's novel Housebreaking hooks the reader--tacking between grief and lust, manipulation and fear--as it races to a conclusion that is both satisfying and surprisingly tender. Pope is a sophisticated, sensitive, and astonishing writer."
-- "Sabina Murray, author of Tales from the New World"
"I could gush here about the roller-coaster twists and turns in Housebreaking. Or I could marvel at the contemporary spin Dan Pope gives the suburban novel that Richard Yates and John Cheever made familiar. But instead I will simply say that Housebreaking is exciting and wonderful from start to finish, and that you must must read it and discover its pleasures for yourself."
-- "Ann Hood, author of The Obituary Writer"
"Like Richard Russo, Dan Pope has a solid grasp of small-town sorrow and middle-aged crazy. Housebreaking is a smart, surehanded novel about sex, love, and the confusions of desire."
-- "Stewart O'Nan, New York Times bestselling author of Faithful"
"Through clean, straightforward prose, Pope energetically inhabits his characters...Housebreaking is more earnest than satirical and its manicured setting incidental in what is ultimately a heartfelt chamber piece of flawed personalities, calamitous decisions, and -unexpected moments of grace."
-- "New York Times Book Review"
