Like Normal People A Novel

This “luminous, meditative novel on the boundaries between childhood, adulthood, and old age” follows one day in the lives of three generations of women (Entertainment Weekly). Like Normal People charts a family constellation that revolves around an off-kilter center: Lena is forty-eight years old, but mentally locked in childhood. Moving deftly between present and past, the novel follows Lena’s day-long escape from her residential home with her troubled twelve-year-old niece. While this odd couple takes refuge on a honky-tonk southern California beach, Lena’s widowed mother, Ella, goes in search of them. In the process, Ella relives her own life’s dreams and disappointments: her marriage to a sweet, loving shoe salesman; her discovery of Lena’s disability; and her aching attempts to give her daughter a “normal” childhood. For so long, Lena has been the focus of Ella’s world—but now, she must contemplate the prospect of letting her daughter go. Covering three entire lifetimes in the course of one day, this powerful, emotional story from the author of Refund, a National Book Award finalist, is “an uplifting and bittersweet testament to uncompromising love” (The New York Post).