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Celebrated by the Boston Globe as "a brilliant anthropologist of the suburbs," the deliciously weird and darkly offbeat Lauren Acampora returns to the secret lives of the polished Connecticut haven that got us all hooked on NPR Best Book of the Year The Wonder Garden, and jolts us with the sparks that fly when those lives collide.
Formerly a model and photographer trying to make it in New York, Louisa Rader is back in her affluent hometown of Nearwater, Connecticut, where she's married to a successful older architect, raising a preteen daughter, and trying to vitalize the provincial local art center. As the years pass, she's grown restless in her safe and comfortable routine, haunted by the flash of the life she used to live. When intense and intriguing young artist-environmentalist Gabriel arrives in town with his aristocratic family, his impact on the Raders has hothouse effects. As Gabriel pushes to realize his artistic vision for the world, he pulls both Louisa and her daughter Sylvie under his spell, with consequences that disrupt the Raders' world forever.
A strange, sexy, and sinister novel of art and obsession, in The Hundred Waters Acampora gives us an incisive, page-turning story of ambition, despair, desire, and the pursuit of fulfillment and freedom at all costs.
"In this tightly paced novel that echoes Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere (2017),Tom Perrotta's Mrs. Fletcher (2017), and A. Natasha Joukovsky's The Portrait of a Mirror (2021), Acampora sets the idealism of youth against middle-age complacency and high-society reservations… With this gem of a novel, Acampora cements herself as a thrilling voice in fiction." —Booklist (starred review)
"With a fluid writing style and a plot that moves along quickly… Absorbing… Excellent." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Arresting… Acampora achieves a sharp and tense depiction of an illusory and stultifying haven." —Publishers Weekly
"Acampora weaves a tale of artistic ambition, climate activism, and the seductive allure of extravagant wealth. Told in the author's signature lush prose… [T]his is an enchanting pool worth sticking your toe into." —Kirkus Reviews
This information about Hundred Waters, The 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.
Lauren Acampora's fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and Antioch Review. Raised in Connecticut, she now lives in Westchester County, New York, with her husband, artist Thomas Doyle, and their daughter.
Author Interview
Link to Lauren Acampora's Website
Name Pronunciation
Lauren Acampora: ah-come-POUR-uh
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