Even after nearly two decades together, the Desplaines have their secrets. Oliver, an aging Wichita entrepreneur, is on his third marriage, and has recently found an even younger mistress. Catherine, his seemingly content wife, has a more colorful past than her husband knows, and it's about to come rushing back when Catherine learns she's been named guardian of a teenage girl she's never met. Meanwhile, the Wichita media is buzzing with the reemergence of a serial killer who haunted Catherine's own adolescence; a murderer has been hiding in plain sight, raising questions of how little any of us can truly know of our neighbors, our loved ones, or ourselves.
**Praise for Bound (A New York Times Notable Book): **
"Antonya Nelson wields words with breathtaking precision in Bound…Turning tiny moments into revelations, she brilliantly exposes the fears and delusions that drive people to rationalize destructive choices…[A] wise exploration of the war between our worst impulses and our better selves."**-O, the Oprah Magazine **
"In her extraordinary fourth novel, Antonya Nelson captures the clamor and swirl of life in this new century … She pulls the tension to a flawlessly calibrated conclusion."-NPR.org
"A short story writer of exhilarating wit and empathy, Nelson returns to the novel after a decade with heightened authority. Tightly coiled, edgy, and funny…[A] sleekly powerful turbine of a novel." -Booklist (starred review)
From Publishers Weekly
Nelson's unflinchingly frank story of the sexual and alcoholic excess buried in the pasts of a married couple is read with care and compassion by Cassandra Campbell, whose breathy voice exposes the hidden unpleasantness in Catherine and Oliver's history. She is a worthy mimic, embodying voices with relative ease, but her strong suit is the narrative tone. Steady, controlled, almost deliberately flat, kept from peaks or valleys of emotion, Campbell mimetically conveys the stifled chaos of Nelson's protagonists, and of their bittersweet bond. A Bloomsbury hardcover. (Oct.)
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From Booklist
Starred Review A short story writer of exhilarating wit and empathy, Nelson returns to the novel after a decade with heightened authority. Tightly coiled, edgy, and funny, this complex tale of transcendent friendship begins with a spectacular death: Misty, a single mother, drives off a cliff. Her surviving daughter, Cattie, is named after Catherine, Misty’s best friend way back when they were young and wild in Wichita. Misty was poor and scrappy; pretty Catherine was the daughter of professors. Wealthy, childless, and married to her much older third husband, philandering Oliver, Catherine is still contending with her rigorous mother’s piercing disapproval even though a stroke has stolen Grace’s ability to speak. It’s a shock to learn that Misty is dead, that she had a daughter, and that Catherine is her namesake’s guardian. Cattie runs away from her Vermont boarding school, embarking on a cross-country odyssey as risky, if not as much fun, as the mad adventures her mother and Catherine miraculously survived. With the supreme recklessness of teen girls, Oliver’s farcical yet poignant dilemmas, Grace’s toughness, a resurgent serial killer, an AWOL soldier, and compelling canine characters, Nelson’s sleekly powerful turbine of a novel riffs cannily on the many meanings of “bound.” --Donna Seaman