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When Louisa and Bear meet at Princeton in 1975, sparks fly. Louisa is the sexually adventurous daughter of a geneticist, Bear the volatile son of a plumber. They dive headfirst into a passionate affair that will alter the course of their lives, changing how they define themselves in the years and relationships that follow. Lisa Gornick's Louisa Meets Bear is a gripping novel in interconnected stories from an author whose work "starts off like a brush fire and then engulfs and burns with fury" (The Huffington Post).
Reading Louisa Meets Bear is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, as we uncover the subtle and startling connections between new characters and the star-crossed lovers. We meet a daughter who stabs her mother when she learns the truth about her father, a wife who sees herself clearly after finding a man dead on her office floor, a mother who discovers a girl in her teenage son's bed. Each character is striking, each rendered with Gornick's trademark sympathy and psychological acuity. We follow them over the course of a half century, from San Francisco to New York City and from Guatemala to Venice, through pregnancies, tragedies, and revelations, until we return to Louisa and Bear.
With characters as flawed and deeply human as those of Elizabeth Strout, and with Alice Munro's gift for piercing insight into the lives of women, Louisa Meets Bear grapples with whether we can - or can't - choose how and whom we love.
"Starred Review. Gornick's brilliantly constructed third novel... captures all the heartbreak and joy of what it is to be human. - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Delicately nuanced and emotionally perceptive... Gornick's exploration of loneliness and loss, private connections and personal upheavals resonates with comforting familiarity and profound brilliance." - Booklist
"Gornick (Tinderbox) describes all of the dark spaces and the buried secrets within the psyche of each character, allowing them slowly to come to light as she delineates the tangled webs woven among even the most casual acquaintances. Those who enjoy literary novels of psychological portent will relish this title." - Library Journal
"Superficial connections devoid of life-giving subtext." - Kirkus
This information about Louisa Meets Bear was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lisa Gornick is the author of the novels Tinderbox and A Private Sorcery. Her stories and essays have appeared widely, including in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, and The Sun, and have received many awards. She holds a BA from Princeton and a PhD in clinical psychology from Yale, and is a graduate of the writing program at New York University and the psychoanalytic training program at Columbia. She lives with her family in New York City.
My Darling Boy by John Dufresne
The story of of a man whose son collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida.
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