"First-rate fiction by a dazzling talent." --Kirkus Reviews, starred
review
In this heartbreakingly beautiful audiobook of disillusioned intimacy
and persistent yearning, beloved and celebrated author Andre Dubus III
explores the bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking
gratification in food and sex, work and love.
In these linked novellas in which characters walk out the back door of
one story and into the next, love is "dirty"--tangled up with need,
power, boredom, ego, fear, and fantasy. On the Massachusetts coast north
of Boston, a controlling manager, Mark, discovers his wife's infidelity
after twenty-five years of marriage. An overweight young woman, Marla,
gains a romantic partner but loses her innocence. A philandering
bartender/aspiring poet, Robert, betrays his pregnant wife. And in the
stunning title novella, a teenage girl named Devon, fleeing a dirty
image of her posted online, seeks respect in the eyes of her widowed
great-uncle Francis and of an Iraq vet she's met surfing the Web.
Slivered by happiness and discontent, aging and death, but also
persistent hope and forgiveness, these beautifully wrought narratives
express extraordinary tenderness toward human beings, our vulnerable
hearts and bodies, our fulfilling and unfulfilling lives alone and with
others.
