From the author of the bestselling memoir Wild Game comes a riveting
novel about Cape Cod, complicated families, and long-buried secrets--for
fans of the New York Times bestsellers The Paper Palace and Ask
Again, Yes.
Ken and Abby Gardner lost their mother when they were small and they
have been haunted by her absence ever since. Their father, Adam, a
brilliant oceanographer, raised them mostly on his own in his remote
home on Cape Cod, where the attachment between Ken and Abby deepened
into something complicated--and as adults their relationship is
strained. Now, years later, the siblings' lives are still deeply
entwined. Ken is a successful businessman with political ambitions and a
picture-perfect family and Abby is a talented visual artist who depends
on her brother's goodwill, in part because he owns the studio where she
lives and works.
As the novel opens, Adam is approaching his seventieth birthday, staring
down his mortality and fading relevance. He has always managed his
bipolar disorder with medication, but he's determined to make one last
scientific breakthrough and so he has secretly stopped taking his pills,
which he knows will infuriate his children. Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are
both harboring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the
periphery of the family--Steph, who doesn't make her connection known.
As Adam grows more attuned to the frequencies of the deep sea and less
so to the people around him, Ken and Abby each plan the elaborate gifts
they will present to their father on his birthday, jostling for primacy
in this small family unit.
Set in the fraught summer of 2016, and drawing on the biblical tale of
Cain and Abel, Little Monsters is an absorbing, sharply observed
family story by a writer who knows Cape Cod inside and out--its Edenic
lushness and its snakes.
