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by Joe McGinniss Jr.
Following the breakout success of his "searing" (The New York Times Book Review) debut novel The Delivery Man, Joe McGinniss Jr. returns with Carousel Court: a bold, original, and exhilarating novel of marriage as blood sport that reads like Revolutionary Road for the era of The Unwinding.
Nick and Phoebe Maguire are a young couple with big dreams who move across the country to Southern California in search of a fresh start for themselves and their infant son following a devastating trauma. But they move at the worst possible time, into an economic crisis that spares few. Instead of landing in a beachside property, strolling the organic food aisles, and selecting private preschools, Nick and Phoebe find themselves living in the dark heart of foreclosure alley, surrounded by neighbors being drowned by their underwater homes who set fire to their belongings, flee in the dead of night, and eye one another with suspicion while keeping twelve-gauge shotguns by their beds.
Trapped, broke, and increasingly desperate, Nick and Phoebe each devise their own plan to claw their way back into the middle class and beyond. Hatched under one roof, their two separate, secret agendas will collide in spectacular fashion.
A blistering and unforgettable vision of the way we live now, Carousel Court paints a darkly honest portrait of modern marriage while also capturing the middle-class America of vanished jobs, abandoned homes, psychotropic cure-alls, infidelity via iPhone, and ruthless choices. As bestselling author Walter Kirn says, "This scathing novel of our strange new century is like nothing else I've read in years."
"Starred Review. A novel of unrelenting tension ... [McGinniss] injects it with an urgency, a sense of constant, inescapable threat that all adds up to a taut page-turner." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. McGinniss (The Delivery Man, 2007) has written a powerful and almost unremittingly bleak novel that may have some readers recalling Yeats' poem 'The Second Coming.'" - Booklist
"The broad brushstrokes painting Southern California in chaos are unnerving and propulsive in their own right, but McGinniss is at his best when describing, with anthropological intensity, the throes of a broken relationship." - Publishers Weekly
"Here it is, the leveraged, frayed, unfaithful, buzzed America that all the baloney entertainment products, including a lot that pose as literature, are designed to cover up. Can you handle the truth? Then step inside. This scathing novel of our strange new century is like nothing else I've read in years." - Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air
"Harrowing, smart, wickedly accurate about the third world of the contemporary United States, and very well written." - Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk about Kevin
"Joe McGinniss Jr. writes with wit and scorching honesty about adultery, addiction, and financial ruin, never losing sight of his characters' humanity and their fractured hope that redemption might be possible after all." - Carolyn Parkhurst, author of The Dogs of Babel and Lost and Found
"Carousel Court pulls no punches, taking on nothing less than marriage, and the false promises of our American Dream. These are great big subjects and Joe McGinniss Jr. is more than up to them." - Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children
"In urgent, kaleidoscopic prose, Joe McGinniss Jr. diagnoses the American Dream with a high fever, jaundice, and severe heartburn. Set in a simmering suburban Los Angeles, Carousel Court is the portrait of a disastrous but thoroughly modern marriage whose young wife, Phoebe Maguire, is hurtling toward a pill-fueled implosion that's impossible to look away from. The pitch-perfect ending reverberates like a handbell after a hurricane." - Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man
This information about Carousel Court 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.
Joe McGinniss Jr. is the author of Carousel Court and The Delivery Man. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.
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