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A Novel
by Carter Bays
From the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother, a hilarious and thought-provoking debut novel set in New York City, following a sprawling cast of characters as they navigate life, love, loss, ambition, and spirituality - without ever looking up from their phones.
It's the summer of 2015, and Alice Quick needs to get to work. She's twenty-eight years old, grieving her mother, barely scraping by as a nanny, and freshly kicked out of her apartment. If she can just get her act together and sign up for the MCAT, she can start chasing her dream of becoming a doctor...but in the Age of Distraction, the distractions are so distracting. There's her tech millionaire brother's religious awakening. His picture-perfect wife's emotional breakdown. Her chaotic new roommate's thirst for adventure. And, of course, there's the biggest distraction of all: Love.
From within the story of one summer in one woman's life, an epic tale is unearthed, spanning continents and featuring a tapestry of characters tied to one another by threads both seen and unseen. Filled with all the warmth, humor, and heart that gained How I Met Your Mother its cult following, The Mutual Friend captures in sparkling detail the chaos of contemporary life, a life lived simultaneously in two different worlds—the physical one and the one behind our screens—and reveals how connected we all truly are.
"Bays writes with real compassion that never turns sentimental, and the structure of the book, told from the point of view of a mysterious omniscient narrator, is ingenious. This is a rare thing: an original, intelligent novel that's not just a perfect summer beach read, but one that deserves serious awards consideration as well. Put down your phone and pick it up. A major accomplishment." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"An imaginatively tender and uncannily exact tale of life on the internet...The Mutual Friend is vast in scope, startling in its precise capture of the reality of intertwined digital lives, and satisfies its ambition with an unexpected humanity and vulnerability." - Booklist (starred review)
"Bays, the cocreator of the television show How I Met Your Mother, debuts with an unwieldy story involving a bunch of people whose lives occasionally intersect in New York City...But while Bays's prose has a distinct flair, he tends to ramble, with the style haltingly alternating between pages-long run-on sentences and blocks of paragraphs with nothing but ellipses. Despite a few good gags, this doesn't add up to much." - Publishers Weekly
"The Mutual Friend is GREAT. Carter Bays is one of the funniest people I know. More importantly though, he always finds the heart and truth in all of his humor. I just loved it. Put down the phones. Unless you're reading The Mutual Friend on it." - Jason Segel
"The Mutual Friend is like a 10-course dinner party with your frankest, wittiest friends confiding all their secrets. It has plenty of full-on belly laughs, but also such granular emotional insight and sharp-eyed observations about modern life and love. This novel makes you feel wonderfully seen, at your best and at your worst, by somebody very kind and very, very funny, who points out all the foibles and fractures you thought nobody noticed and let's you know you're not alone." - Elan Mastai, author of All Our Wrong Todays
"The Mutual Friend is a big, heart-squeezing ode to all that matters most, dressed up in the disguise of a fun, juicy ensemble story bubbling over with comically bad dates, career missteps, and awkward adult friendships. You'll laugh; you'll cry; you'll stare out the window and contemplate the meaning of life. I did, anyway." - Mary Laura Philpott, author of I Miss You When I Blink and Bomb Shelter
This information about The Mutual Friend 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.
Carter Bays is the co-creator of the Emmy-winning series How I Met Your Mother. He lives in California with his wife and three children. The Mutual Friend is his first novel.
Pony Confidential
by Christina Lynch
In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.
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Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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