 | |
| Author | Martha McPhee |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Relationships |
| Published | 2002, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 336 |
| ISBN | 0-15-100613-X |
| Preceded by | Bright Angel Time |
Gorgeous Lies (2002) is a novel written by American author Martha McPhee. It is a sequel to her first book, Bright Angel Time .
This book explores the life of Anton Furey, a charismatic therapist who is dying. It details the familial relationships during this time, which include his five grown kids from a former marriage, his wife's three grown kids from a former marriage, and the grown child they had together. That child -Alice - moves as an adult back to the farm (known as Chardin) where she was raised . While the family lived there – in a communal lifestyle – they got the reputation of being the new American "blended family", in a period of more frequent divorce and new families. Because of that, reporters and film crews took an interest, and documented their lives.
As Anton gets sicker, Alice and the other children find many emotions surfacing from the years spent at Chardin. Throughout this process, they start reliving the issues they had, and make new attempts to make peace with their father.
Publishers Weekly wrote that it has "an offbeat writing style and poetic metaphors", but not all of the characters "are fully sketched". [1] Michael Harris of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "[McPhee] avoids the extremes of hippie nostalgia and conservative revisionism and doesn't provide any simple answers". Harris describes her prose as "elegant and airy". [2] Cathleen Medwick of O, The Oprah Magazine described the book as "an unusually strong novel [that] explores the wild frontier of domestic life." [3] Bruce Bawer of The New York Times wrote, "If McPhee's first novel was a case of relatively orthodox storytelling, her second is a free-associative jumble of memory and emotion that makes the reader feel like a family therapist on marathon duty." [4] Kirkus Reviews wrote, "Somewhat rambling, but fine work nevertheless: a moving portrait of a foolish, foul-hearted, but impossibly innocent man." [5]
David Walter Foster is a Canadian record producer, film composer, and music executive. He has won 16 Grammy Awards from 47 nominations. Foster's career began as a keyboardist for the pop group Skylark in the early 1970s before focusing largely on composing and production. Often in tandem with songwriter Diane Warren, Foster has contributed to material for prominent music industry artists in various genres since then, and is credited with production on over 40 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100. He has also chaired Verve Records from 2012 to 2016.
Theodore Bruce Bawer is an American-Norwegian writer. Born and raised in New York, he has been a resident of Norway since 1999 and became a citizen of Norway in 2024. He is a literary, film, and cultural critic and a novelist and poet, who has also written about gay rights, Christianity, and Islam.
Gregory Maguire is an American novelist. He is the author of Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and several dozen other novels for adults and children. Many of Maguire's adult novels are inspired by classic children's stories. Maguire published his first novel, The Lightning Time, in 1978. Wicked, published in 1995, was his first novel for adults. It was adapted into a popular Broadway musical in 2003.
Harold Brodkey, born Aaron Roy Weintraub, was an American short-story writer and novelist.
Henry Farrell was an American novelist and screenwriter, best known as the author of the renowned gothic horror story What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, which was made into a film starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
The Color Purple is a 1985 American epic coming-of-age period drama film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Menno Meyjes. It is based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1982 novel of the same name by Alice Walker and was Spielberg's eighth film as a director, marking a turning point in his career as it was a departure from the summer blockbusters for which he had become known. It was also the first feature film directed by Spielberg for which John Williams did not compose the music, instead featuring a score by Quincy Jones, who also produced. The film stars Whoopi Goldberg in her breakthrough role, with Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey, Margaret Avery, and Adolph Caesar.
Chris A. Bohjalian is an American novelist and the author of over twenty novels, including Midwives (1997), The Sandcastle Girls (2012), The Guest Room (2016), and The Flight Attendant (2018). Bohjalian's work has been published in over thirty languages, and three of his novels have been adapted into films. Bohjalian's The Flight Attendant has been adapted for a television drama starring Kaley Cuoco.
Iyanla Vanzant is an American inspirational speaker, lawyer, New Thought spiritual teacher, author, life coach, and television personality. She is known primarily for her books, her eponymous talk show, and her appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show. From 2012 to 2021, she served as host of OWN's Iyanla: Fix My Life.
Akhil Sharma is an Indian-American author and professor of creative writing. His first published novel An Obedient Father won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His second, Family Life, won the 2015 Folio Prize and 2016 International Dublin Literary Award.
A Good House is the first novel by Canadian writer Bonnie Burnard, published by Picador in 1999 and later by Henry Holt and Company in United States of America. It was the winner of that year's Scotiabank Giller Prize. The novel narrates the story of a family in three generations, five houses starting from 1949 until 1997.
Martha McPhee is an American novelist whose work focuses on social and financial mobility in the United States.
The Lazarus Project is a 2008 novel by Bosnian fiction writer and journalist Aleksandar Hemon. It features the true story of the death of Lazarus Averbuch, a teenaged Jewish immigrant to Chicago who was shot and killed by a police officer in 1908. It was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the winner of the inaugural Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in 2010.
Amy M. Homes is an American writer best known for her controversial novels and unusual short stories, which feature extreme situations and characters. Notably, her novel The End of Alice (1996) is about a convicted child molester and murderer.
The Visit of the Royal Physician is a 1999 novel by the Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist. It is known as The Royal Physician's Visit in the United States, translated into English by Tiina Nunnally. Against the backdrop of political turbulence and the enlightenment in the second half of the 18th century, the narrative revolves around the court of the mentally ill King Christian VII of Denmark, and the romance between the king's physician, Johann Friedrich Struensee, and the queen, Caroline Mathilde. The novel won the August Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Gut Symmetries is a 1997 novel by the British literary writer Jeanette Winterson, exploring themes of human relationships and physics.
Still Alice is a 2007 novel by Lisa Genova, a neuroscientist and author. The novel is about a woman who suffers early-onset Alzheimer's disease. It is Genova's first novel.
Cynthia Bond is an American author and actress. Her debut novel Ruby spent six consecutive weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list, and was chosen as a selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0. She was born in Hempstead, Texas, and now lives in Los Angeles. Bond won a journalism scholarship to Northwestern University she then studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. Bond was a PEN Rosenthal Fellow for Emerging Writers. Bond is also on staff at the Paradigm Malibu Adolescent Treatment Center.
Ellen Sussman is a New York Times bestselling author of four novels. She was born in Trenton, New Jersey and resides in Sebastopol, California with her husband. Sussman's work features settings and characters from France to Bali to the United States. She lived in Paris from 1988 to 1993 with her first husband and two daughters.
Batman: The Knight is an American comic book published by DC Comics. The 10-issue limited series, written by Chip Zdarsky and illustrated by Carmine Di Giandomenico, began publication on January 18, 2022.
Hello Beautiful is a 2023 historical fiction novel and the fourth book by American writer Ann Napolitano. It is a drama about the four sisters in an Italian Catholic family in Chicago; two sisters fall in love with the same man, causing the family to split apart for 25 years. Hello Beautiful was published on March 14, 2024, by the Dial Press. It was Oprah Winfrey's 100th book club selection.