All This Could Be Yours

Victor Tuchman - a power-hungry real estate developer and all-round bad man - is finally on his deathbed. His daughter Alex can finally unearth the secret of who he really was. She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tightlipped mother, Barbra. As Barbra fends off Alex's unrelenting questions, she reflects on her tumultuous married life. Meanwhile Gary, Alex's brother, is incommunicado, trying to get his movie career off the ground in Los Angeles. And Gary's wife, Twyla, is having a nervous breakdown, bursting into crying fits in drug stores. Each family must figure out a way to move forward - with one another, for themselves and for the sake of their children.

About the Author :
Jami Attenberg is the author of a story collection, Instant Love, and the novels The Kept Man, The Melting Season, All Grown Up, Saint Mazie and The Middlesteins, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. She has been published in sixteen languages. She lives in New Orleans. Follow her @jamiattenberg

Review :
A family epic that's pointed and funny, touching and true: in All This Could Be Yours, Jami Attenberg captures the shades of light and dark that swirl among his people as a patriarch lays dying; the anxieties of our current era; the breaths and beats of New Orleans. A great novel about an irredeemable man and the family he nearly destroyed in pursuing his desires without remorse. A deep dive into the darker side of family bonds, All This Could Be Yours is another compulsively readable novel by Jami Attenberg ... This is a parable for our times. Gets so deep into the psyches of her characters that the story ends up seeming electric with ruin, and with possible resurrection. An ambitious and utterly delectable novel about families and their secrets that opens up, pleasurably, like a set of nesting dolls. Jami Attenberg's work is so deeply attuned to humans and our imperfect attempts to love each other ... Attenberg handles it all with an expert touch and a keen sense of what, despite all the sadness and secrets, keeps people connected, striving for moments of beauty and tenderness in a dark world Versatile, earthbound, and unforgiving ... a comic blend of messy family drama. No one understands the contradictions of the human heart and how our grace and our failures reverberate through our families better than Jami Attenberg. And no one writes about our grace and failures with humor and compassion better than her either. A dark, deliciously captivating look into the way a toxic patriarch can poison everyone around him ... There are no easy resolutions offered here, but that's as it should be. A brutal and beautiful story of familial dysfunction ... Attenberg doesn't flinch from digging into life's messiness, pressing gently but resolutely into wounds to see what oozes out. As family secrets unspool, the years of resentment and anger burn off in this tightly drawn novel ... Attenberg's unflinching ability to create utterly vulnerable and vicious characters, locked in a cycle of want and need, demand your attention...arguably Attenberg's best novel to date. Unflinching ... a devastating dissection of the impact of bad parenting