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Elegantly written and ferociously paced, emotionally nuanced and morally complex - marks the emergence of a prodigiously gifted new novelist.
A riveting novel about loyalty and self-knowledge, and the conflict between who we want to be to others and who we must be for ourselves.
Carrie Bell has lived in Wisconsin all her life. She's had the same best friend, the same good relationship with her mother, the same boyfriend, Mike, now her fiancé, for as long as anyone can remember. It's with real surprise she finds that, at age twenty-three, her life has begun to feel suffocating. She longs for a change, an upheaval, for a chance to begin again.
That chance is granted to her, terribly, when Mike is injured in an accident. Now Carrie has to question everything she thought she knew about herself and the meaning of home. She must ask: How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or of weakness to walk away from someone in need?
The Dive from Clausen's Pier reminds us how precarious our lives are and how quickly they can be divided into before and after, whether by random accident or by the force of our own desires. It begins with a disaster that could happen, out of the blue, in anybody's life, and it forces us to ask how we would bear up in the face of tragedy and what we know, or think we know, about our deepest allegiances. Elegantly written and ferociously paced, emotionally nuanced and morally complex, The Dive from Clausen's Pier marks the emergence of a prodigiously gifted new novelist.
Halfway through this reviewer was raving about A Dive from Clausen's Pier to friends, but at the end she came away feeling disappointed in the lead character and somewhat dissatisfied with the conclusion that seemed to be out of character. Putting this aside, A Dive from Clausen's Pier is a thought provoking first novel recommended to many women.
If you liked The Dive From Clausen's Pier, try these:
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With the emotional complexity of Everything I Never Told You and the psychological suspense of The Girl on the Train, O. Henry Prize winner Jan Ellison delivers a brilliantly paced, beautifully written debut novel about one woman's reckoning with a youthful mistake.
Named one of the best books of the year by San Francisco Chronicle
by Akhil Sharma
Published 2015
Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.
Madison Smartt Bell
Ann Packer's first novel has all the weight of reality, tooled with a jeweler's precision. The Dive from Clausen's Pier is a poignant and painstakingly rendered account of a woman in flight from catastrophe, in search of herself.
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