Breakable You - Hardcover

Morton, Brian

3.5

484 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151011923 ISBN 13: 9780151011926

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2006

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Adam Weller is a moderately successful novelist, past his prime, but squiring around a much younger woman and still longing for greater fame and glory. His former wife, Eleanor, is unhappily playing the role of the overweight, discarded woman. Their daughter Maud has just begun a frankly sexual affair that unexpectedly becomes life-changing. Into each of these lives the past intrudes in a way that will test them to their core. With perfect pitch and a rare empathy, Brian Morton is equally adept at portraying the life of the mind and how it plays out in the world, brilliantly tracing the border between honor and violation. Here Morton tells his strongest story yet—a story about love, friendship, literary treachery, and what each of us owes to the past.

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Review:

PRAISE FOR "BREAKABLE YOU" "Inside [Morton's] broad comedy of manners is a heartfelt novel about the redemptive power of suffering."--"The New Yorker " "A literary theft, a death and the sparking of desire make for a tumultuous year in the lives of four New Yorkers fumbling toward belated self-discovery... In this polished, affecting novel, their stories intertwine and uplift: As Maud, the book's tender heart, reflects, striving is 'the law of life.'"—"People "

PRAISE FOR "BREAKABLE YOU" "Inside [Morton's] broad comedy of manners is a heartfelt novel about the redemptive power of suffering."--"The New Yorker " "A literary theft, a death and the sparking of desire make for a tumultuous year in the lives of four New Yorkers fumbling toward belated self-discovery... In this polished, affecting novel, their stories intertwine and uplift: As Maud, the book's tender heart, reflects, striving is 'the law of life.'"--"People "

PRAISE FOR"BREAKABLE YOU" "Inside [Morton's] broad comedy of manners is a heartfelt novel about the redemptive power of suffering."--"The New Yorker" "A literary theft, a death and the sparking of desire make for a tumultuous year in the lives of four New Yorkers fumbling toward belated self-discovery... In this polished, affecting novel, their stories intertwine and uplift: As Maud, the book's tender heart, reflects, striving is 'the law of life.'"--"People"

PRAISE FOR BRIAN MORTON"For some readers, Brian Morton may still be an undiscovered treasure. He won t be for long." Newsday

"The passion of Morton s characters ring true . . . because the romantic ones conflict with such things as professional ambition and jealously." Chicago Tribune

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PRAISE FOR BRIAN MORTON "For some readers, Brian Morton may still be an undiscovered treasure. He won't be for long." - Newsday

"The passion of Morton's characters ring true . . . because the romantic ones conflict with such things as professional ambition and jealously." -Chicago Tribune

From the Back Cover:

Remarkable . . . Morton] conjures up lives so vivid the reader mourns their passing. The New York Times Book Review
In this heartbreakingly beautiful novel, Brian Morton gives us four complicated, passionate people whose lives are tested by tragedy.Breakable You is the story of Maud, a brilliant but fragile graduate student; her father, Adam, a novelist hungry for greater fame; Eleanor, his former wife, a psychologist struggling to reinvent herself in middle age; and Maud s new lover, Samir, an Arab American intellectual in mourning for his lost daughter.A novel that is both clear-eyed and deeply compassionate, Breakable You examines what we do when life gives us more than we think we can bear.
"A literary theft, a death and the sparking of desire make for a tumultuous year in the lives of four New Yorkers fumbling toward belated self-discovery . . . In this polished, affecting novel, their stories intertwine and uplift: As Maud, the book's tender heart, reflects, striving is 'the law of life.'" People

"Morton is the rare writer equally invested in people and ideas . . . [He] creates some of the most complex and real female characters of any writer."--San Francisco Chronicle
BRIAN MORTON is the author of three previous novels, including Starting Out in the Evening, which won the Koret Jewish Book Award and was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award, and A Window Across the River, which was a Today Book Club selection. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University and lives in New York.Reading Group Guide available at www.HarcourtBooks.com."

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