β Scribed by A. M. Homes
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Harry is a Richard Nixon scholar who leads a quiet, regular life; his brother George is a high-flying TV producer, with a murderous temper. They have been uneasy rivals since childhood. Then one day George loses control so extravagantly that he precipitates Harry into an entirely new life.
In May We Be Forgiven, Homes gives us a darkly comic look at 21st century domestic life - at individual lives spiraling out of control, bound together by family and history.The cast of characters experience adultery, accidents, divorce, and death. But this is also a savage and dizzyingly inventive vision of contemporary America, whose dark heart Homes penetrates like no other writer - the strange jargons of its language, its passive aggressive institutions, its inhabitants' desperate craving for intimacy and their pushing it away with litigation, technology, paranoia. At the novel's core are the spaces in between, where the modern family comes together to re-form itself. May We Be Forgiven explores contemporary orphans losing and finding themselves anew; and it speaks above all to the power of personal transformation - simultaneously terrifying and inspiring.
Praise for MayWe Be Forgiven
An entertaining, old-fashioned American story about second chancesA.M. Homes is a writer Ill pretty much follow anywhere because shes indeed so smart, its scary; yet shes not without heartMay We Be Forgiven [is] deeply imbued with the kind of Its A Wonderful Life-type belief in redemption that we Americans will always be suckers for, and rightly so. Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
Cheever country with a black comedy upgradeHomes crams a tremendous amount of ambition into May We Be Forgiven, with its dark humor, its careening plot, its sex-strewn suburb and a massive cast of memorable characters...its riskiest content, however, is something different: sentiment. This is a Tin Man story, in which the zoned-out Harry slowly grows a heart. Carolyn Kellogg, *The Los Angeles Times*
Darkly funnythe moments shared between this ad hoc family are the novels most endearingHomes signature trait is a fearless inclination to torment her characters and render their failures, believing that the reader is sophisticated enough and forgiving enough to tag along. Katie Arnold-Ratliff, *Time Magazine*
Homes, whose masterful handling of suburban dystopia merits her own adjective, may have just written her midcareer magnum opus with this portrait of a flawed Nixonian bent on some sort of emotional amnesty. Christopher Bollen, *Interview*
At once tender and uproariously funnyone of the strangest, most miraculous journeys in recent fiction, not unlike a man swimming home to his lonely house, one swimming pool at a time: it is an act of desperation turned into one of grace. John Freeman, *The Cleveland Plain Dealer*
A big American story with big American themes, the saga of the triumph of a new kind of self-invented nuclear family over cynicism, apathy, loneliness, greed, and technological tyrannythis novel has a strong moral core, neither didactic nor judgmental, that holds out the possibility of redemption through connection. Kate Christensen, Elle
Heartfelt, and hilariousAlthough Homes weaves in piercing satire on subjects like healthcare, education, and the prison system, her tone never veers into the overly arch, mostly thanks to Harold a loveably earnest guy who creates his own kind of oddball, 21st century family. Leigh Newman, *O The Oprah Magazine*
A.M. Homes has long been one of our most important and original writers of fiction. May We Be Forgiven is her most ambitious as well as her most accessible novel to date; sex and violence invade the routines of suburban domestic life in a way that reminded me of The World According to Garp, although in the end its a thoroughly original work of imagination. Jay McInerney
This novel starts at maximum force -- and then it really gets going. I can't remember when I last read a novel of such narrative intensity; an unflinching account of a catastrophic, violent, black-comic, transformative year in the history of one broken American family. Flat-out amazing. Salman Rushdie
I started this book in the A.M., finished in the P.M., and couldnt sleep all night. Ms. Homes just gets better and better.Gary Shteyngart
What if whoever wrote the story of Job had a sense of humor? Nixon is pondered. One character donates her organs. Another tries to grow a heart. A seductive minefield of a novel from A.M. Homes. John Sayles
I started reading A.M. Homes twenty years ago. Wild and funny, questioning and true, she is a writer to go travelling with on the journey called life. Jeanette Winterson
A. M. Homes is the author of the memoir The Mistresss Daughter and the novels This Book Will Save Your Life, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the story collections The Safety of Objects and Things You Should Know. She lives in New York City.
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