Breakable You

Last updated
Breakable You
Breakable You.jpg
First edition
Author Brian Morton
LanguageEnglish
Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pages368
ISBN 0151011923
Preceded byA Window Across the River 

Breakable You is the fourth novel written by American author Brian Morton. It was published in 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The book was made into a 2017 film starring Holly Hunter, Tony Shalhoub and Alfred Molina.

Contents

Characters

The story, like most of Morton's books, focuses around three or four central characters, and the omniscient point of view changes between them in each chapter.

List of main characters:a

Minor characters

Critical reception

The book was well reviewed by critics. The New York Times gave it a positive review, writing: "Terrible fates befall some of Morton’s characters, undeserved; he seems, at times, to bring them to life only to make them suffer. It’s a complaint usually reserved for a higher power, and a tribute to Morton’s craft: conjuring up lives so vivid the reader mourns their passing." [1] The New York Sun wrote "Breakable You has succeeded in demonstrating, once again, Mr. Morton's appealing and humane gift." [2]

Related Research Articles

Lucy Maud Montgomery Canadian author

Lucy Maud Montgomery, published as L. M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a series of novels beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables. The book was an immediate success. The title character, orphan Anne Shirley, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following.

Danielle Steel American romance novel writer (born 1947)

Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel is an American writer, best known for her romance novels. She is the bestselling author alive and the fourth-bestselling fiction author of all time, with over 800 million copies sold. As of 2021, she has written 190 books, including over 141 novels.

<i>The Sun Also Rises</i> Novel by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, his first, that portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early and enduring modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. However, Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work", and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel. The novel was published in the United States in October 1926 by Scribner's. A year later, Jonathan Cape published the novel in London under the title Fiesta. It remains in print.

Jonathan Lethem American novelist, essayist, short story writer

Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.

Pat Barker English writer and novelist

Patricia Mary W. Barker, is an English writer and novelist. She has won many awards for her fiction, which centres on themes of memory, trauma, survival and recovery. Her work is described as direct, blunt and plainspoken. In 2012, The Observer named the Regeneration Trilogy as one of "The 10 best historical novels".

Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-three novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail," her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language."

<i>Possession</i> (Byatt novel) 1990 A.S. Byatt novel, Booker prize winner

Possession: A Romance is a 1990 best-selling novel by British writer A. S. Byatt that won the 1990 Booker Prize. The novel explores the postmodern concerns of similar novels, which are often categorised as historiographic metafiction, a genre that blends approaches from both historical fiction and metafiction.

<i>Breathing Lessons</i> Family truths emerge at a funeral, Pulitzer Prize 1989

Breathing Lessons is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by American author Anne Tyler, published in 1988. It is her eleventh novel and won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Sara Maitland is a British writer of religious fantasy. A novelist, she is also known for her short stories. Her work has a magic realist tendency.

<i>The Spoils of Poynton</i>

The Spoils of Poynton is a novel by Henry James, first published under the title The Old Things as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly in 1896 and then as a book in 1897. This novel traces the shifting relations among three people and a magnificent collection of art, decorative arts, and furniture arrayed like jewels in a country house called Poynton. Mrs. Gereth, a widow of impeccable taste and iron will, formed the collection over decades only to have it torn away from her when her son Owen decides to marry a frivolous woman. The story is largely told from the viewpoint of Fleda Vetch, a keenly intelligent young woman of straitened circumstances who, shortly after becoming the intimate friend and companion of Mrs. Gereth, falls in love with Owen. Sympathetic to Mrs. Gereth's anguish over losing the fine things she patiently collected, Fleda shuttles between the estranged mother and son, becoming ever more involved in their affairs.

The Betsy-Tacy books are a series of semi-autobiographical novels by American novelist and short-story writer Maud Hart Lovelace (1892-1980), which were originally published between 1940 and 1955 by the Thomas Y. Crowell Co. The books are now published by HarperCollins. The first four books were illustrated by Lois Lenski and the remainder by Vera Neville.

Rosa Campbell Praed Australian novelist

Rosa Campbell Praed, often credited as Mrs. Campbell Praed, was an Australian novelist in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her large bibliography covered multiple genres, and books for children as well as adults. She has been described as the first Australian novelist to achieve a significant international reputation.

Antonia White was a British writer and translator, known primarily for Frost in May, a semi-autobiographical novel set in a convent school. It was the first book reissued by Virago Press in 1978, as part of their Modern Classics series of books by previously neglected women authors.

<i>The Broken Bubble</i> Novel by Philip K. Dick

The Broken Bubble is an early mainstream novel by American science fiction author Philip K. Dick. It was written around 1956 under the longer title The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt but was rejected for publication in the 1950s, as were all of Dick's "straight" (non-SF) novels at the time. It was published in hardcover posthumously with a shortened title in 1988.

Alice French

Alice French, better known as Octave Thanet, was an American novelist and short fiction writer.

<i>The Years</i>

The Years is a 1937 novel by Virginia Woolf, the last she published in her lifetime. It traces the history of the Pargiter family from the 1880s to the "present day" of the mid-1930s.

<i>The Gum Thief</i> 2007 novel by Douglas Coupland

The Gum Thief is Canadian author Douglas Coupland's twelfth novel. It was published on September 25, 2007, by Random House Canada in Canada and Bloomsbury Publishing in the United States.

Eleanor Lerman is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer.

<i>Madonna</i> (book) Book by Andrew Morton

Madonna is a biography by English author Andrew Morton, chronicling the life of American recording artist Madonna. The book was released in November 2001 by St. Martin's Press in the United States and by Michael O'Mara Books in the United Kingdom. Morton decided to write a biography on Madonna in 2000. The release was announced in April 2001 by St. Martin's Press. President and publisher Sally Richardson described the biography to contain details about Madonna's ambitions, her relationships and her lifestyle.

<i>Lady of the Forest</i> Book by Jennifer Roberson

Lady of the Forest: A Novel of Sherwood is a 1992 historical fiction novel by American author Jennifer Roberson. A re-telling of the Robin Hood legend from the perspective of twelve characters associated with the legend, the story centers around English noblewoman Lady Marian FitzWalter's encounters with Lord Robert of Locksley and his scheming rival the Sheriff of Nottingham amid the backdrop of Prince John's schemes – he aims to increase his own wealth and power at the expense of post-Conquest England and his brother, King Richard.

References

  1. Mishan, Ligaya (October 1, 2006). "City of Grief (Published 2006)" via NYTimes.com.
  2. "Difficulty of Empathy". The New York Sun.