A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help us start anew.
It's a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamt of coming for years―she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she's here without him. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe―which makes it that much more surprising when the women can’t stop confiding in each other.
In turns uproariously, absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach's The Wedding People is a look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined―and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.
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“Espach’s wit and warmth deliver a gratifying story about how people who have given up might find a reason to start caring again.”
— The Washington Post
“Deeply satisfying. . . . A story of what it means to lift oneself out of one life and into another through acts of individual will and fellowship with others. . . . Espach is now three for three on delivering funny, emotionally moving explorations of the difficulties people have in being themselves.”
— Chicago Tribune
“Deceptively complex...Espach’s story of a life-changing chance encounter is as rewarding as it is unexpected.”
— Time
“They say a good actor can read a phone book and still keep an audience spellbound. Alison Espach is that kind of writer. She is a master of taking the seemingly mundane and creating moments that transfix.”
— Star Tribune
“Alison Espach! How does she do it? I mean, really―how? The Wedding People is so utterly, ringingly true it feels less like fiction than like a field guide to personhood. It's so funny and romantic that I sometimes laughed out loud and sometimes got actual goosebumps. I tore through it like I didn't have a disordered deficit of attention. It's a perfect novel. I loved it.”
— Catherine Newman, author of Sandwich
Named a Best Book of 2022 by NPR and Chicago Tribune
A People Magazine “Best Book of 2022”
An Indie Next Pick 2022
A dazzlingly unconventional love story for readers of Ask Again, Yes and Tell the Wolves I’m Home.
For much of her life, Sally Holt has been mystified by the things her older sister, Kathy, seems to have been born knowing. Kathy has answers for all of Sally’s questions about life, about love, and about Billy Barnes, a rising senior and local basketball star who mans the concession stand at the town pool. The girls have been fascinated by Billy ever since he jumped off the roof in elementary school, but Billy has never shown much interest in them until the summer before Sally begins eighth grade. By then, their mutual infatuation with Billy is one of the few things the increasingly different sisters have in common. Sally spends much of that summer at the pool, watching in confusion and excitement as her sister falls deeper in love with Billy―until a tragedy leaves Sally’s life forever intertwined with his.
Opening in the early nineties and charting almost two decades of shared history and missed connections, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is both a breathtaking love story about two broken people who are unexplainably, inconveniently drawn to each other and a wryly astute coming-of-age tale brimming with unexpected moments of joy.
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“…like Ms. Espach’s excellent 2011 debut, “The Adults,” about another traumatized relationship, the novel is incongruously funny. This is the humor of irony and conversational banter, the deflections used when intense grief threatens to overwhelm ordinary middle-class existence. Ms. Espach uses irony well—it guards against overt sentimentality but it’s transparent enough that the turmoil and confusion of her characters are movingly apparent.”
— Wall Street Journal
“Riveting.”
— People Magazine)
“It wasn’t exactly a sudden disappearance, but fans of Alison Espach’s first novel, the wonderful The Adults, have had to wait 11 years for her follow-up. Good news: It’s more than worth it. Her second book follows Sally, a 28-year-old woman looking back on a year of her childhood in which her older sister was killed in a car crash. While the subject matter is obviously heartbreaking, Espach’s book is often quite funny, and the structure – it’s told in the second person – is fascinating. Espach once again proves that she’s a brilliantly talented author.”
— NPR, Michael Schaub, book critic
“Heartbreaking and funny, often in the same sentence—a deeply felt, finely wrought, and highly satisfying novel. Alison Espach has created a family whose every sorrow, joy, and idiosyncrasy is utterly, vibrantly real.”
— New York Times bestselling author Claire Lombardo
Named a Best book of 2011 by Wall Street Journal
Library Journal Top Ten Fiction/Media of 2011
New York Times Editor’s Choice
In her ruefully funny and wickedly perceptive debut novel, Alison Espach deftly dissects matters of the heart and captures the lives of children and adults as they come to terms with life, death, and love.
At the center of this affluent suburban universe is Emily Vidal, a smart and snarky teenager, who gets involved in a suspect relationship with one of the adults after witnessing a suicide in her neighborhood. Among the cast of unforgettable characters is Emily’s father, whose fiftieth birthday party has the adults descending upon the Vidal’s patio; her mother, who has orchestrated the elaborate party even though she and her husband are getting a divorce; and an assortment of eccentric neighbors, high school teachers, and teenagers who teem with anxiety and sexuality and an unbridled desire to be noticed, and ultimately loved.
An irresistible chronicle of a modern young woman’s struggle to grow up, The Adults lays bare—in perfect pitch—a world where an adult and a child can so dangerously be mistaken for the same exact thing.
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“A smart first novel.”
— People
“[An outstanding coming-of-age novel…one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. Ms. Espach’s coup is to chart Emily’s growth through her maturing sense of humor.”
— The Wall Street Journal
“This cri de coeur carries a freshness and charm—honorable, too, for its cutting accuracy.”
— The San Francisco Chronicle
“Teeming with clever insights, witty acerbic dialogue, and a helplessly loving acknowledgement of family quirkiness.”
— School Library Journal
“Espach nicely balances the acidic and the sweet in her coming-of-age tale.”
— Entertainment Weekly
“Sharp and witty.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Coming of age with a quick wit and sharp eye…The Adults is as idiosyncratic as it is stirring.”
— The New York Times Daily Review
“Espach perfects the snarky, postironic deadpan of the 1990s and teenagers everywhere, and her ear for modern speech and eye for fresh detail transform a familiar story into an education in what it means to be a grown-up.”
— Publisher’s Weekly