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The Daylight Marriage
Author:
Pitlor, Heidi
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Class:
Fiction
Age: Adult
Language: English
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LC: PS3616.I
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ISBN-13: 9781616203689
LCCN: 2014042713
Imprint: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
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Pub Date: 05/05/2015
Availability: Out of Print Confirmed
List: $24.95
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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245 pages ; 22 cm
H 8.5625",
W 5.875",
D 0.875",
0.13 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
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Bibliographies:
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Awards:
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Booklist Starred Reviews
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Starred Reviews:
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Booklist
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TIPS Subjects:
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Psychological Fiction
Family Life
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BISAC Subjects: |
FICTION / Family Life / General
FICTION / Psychological
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LC Subjects:
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Domestic fiction
Missing persons, Investigation, Fiction
Mystery fiction
Spouses, Fiction
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SEARS Subjects: |
Domestic fiction
Missing persons, Fiction
Mystery fiction
Spouses, Fiction
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Reading Programs: |
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Annotations |
Publisher Annotations | 01/23/2015 |
Hannah was the kind of woman who turned heads. Tall and graceful, naturally pretty, often impulsive, always spirited, the upper-class girl who picked, of all men, Lovell--the introverted climate scientist, the practical one who thought he could change the world if he could just get everyone to listen to reason. After a magical honeymoon they settled in the suburbs to raise their two children. But over the years, Lovell and Hannah's conversations have become charged with resentments and unspoken desires. She's become withdrawn and directionless. His work affords him a convenient distraction. The children can sense the tension, which they've learned to mostly ignore. Until, after one explosive argument, Hannah vanishes. And Lovell, for the first time, is forced to examine the trajectory of his marriage through the lens of memory--and the eyes of his children. As he tries to piece together what happened to his wife--and to their lives together--readers follow Hannah through that single day when the smallest of decisions takes her to places she never intended to go. With the intensity of 'The Lovely Bones,' the balance of wit and heartbreak of 'The Descendants,' and the emotional acuity of Anne Tyler's work, 'The Daylight Marriage' is at its heart a novel about what happens when our intuitions override our logic, with a page-turning plot that doesn't reveal its secrets until the very end. |
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Starred Reviews: |
Booklist | 03/01/2015 |
Climate scientist Lovell and his beautiful but unhappy wife, Hannah, had a big fight the night before she went missing. As the days following her disappearance stretch into weeks, Lovell is forced to evaluate their relationship and the road that took them to this place, all the while dealing with the media, the police, and the suspicions of his own children. The dread-inducing narrative masterfully switches between Hannah's actions on that fateful day and Lovell's experience afterward. He had been deeply involved in his work, absent at home, and rubbed raw by Hannah's displeasure. Hannah, meanwhile, had fallen into the banal suburban life she had mocked. Pitlor brings forth the emotions that surge beneath the surface with the precision and power of a conductor. The couple's private examinations of how they ended up hurling insults at each other in their bedroom are thoughtful, though biased, and their combined perspectives create a more subtly shaded portrait of a marriage. This powerful analysis of how dreams become nightmares will make readers want to hold their loved ones close. Thoreson, Bridget. 256p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2015. |
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Journal Reviews |
BookPage | 05/05/2015 |
The central characters in The Daylight Marriage, Hannah and Lovell Hall, married young. She wanted stability; He wanted a chance at love. But as the years passed, resentments and unmet desires festered below the surface of their neat facade, creating a rift between the husband and wife that seemed insurmountable. Always a beauty, Hannah grew up impulsive and spunky, a member of an upper-class family who took luxurious vacations and lived in mansions. Lovell, a climate scientist, was raised squarely in the middle class, in a home where emotions were more reserved and everything was practical. Despite their differences, the two try form a life together: Lovell works at his university job, which provides a distraction from his tenuous home life, and Hannah takes care of their two children, Janine and Ethan, and works a part-time job at a flower shop. But after Hannah disappears the morning following an explosive argument with Lovell, questions arise not only from the community and the police but from within the family; Janine and Ethan grapple with the absence of their mother while also suspecting their father of involvement. While trying to deal with the intricacies of Hannah's disappearance, Lovell must also attempt hold his loosely knit family together. The Daylight Marriage is structured in two sets of chapters that alternate between Hannah's and Lovell's respective viewpoints, keeping the pages turning as the stories of love, loss, growth and grief progress. Heidi Pitlor is a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and published her first novel, The Birthdays, in 2006. She has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007, and lives outside Boston with her husband and twin son and daughter. In The Daylight Marriage, she combines two distinct stories in one--a suspenseful crime narrative and the story of a failing relationship--to form a novel that captures readers from the first page on. Haley Herfurth. BookPageXTRA Online Review. BOOKPAGE, c2015. |
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Kirkus Reviews | 03/01/2015 |
A wife and mother goes missing, and a family is forced to reassess both the past and the future.Call it Gone Woman. The morning after a bad argument with her husband, Lovell, a climate scientist, 39-year-old Hannah Hall disappears on her way to work. When some of her possessions and then pieces of bone are found on a South Boston beach, it gets progressively harder for Lovell and their two children, 15-year-old Janine and 8-year-old Ethan, to fend off their fears for her safety. These are the scant plot points of Best American Short Stories series editor Pitlor's second novel (The Birthdays, 2006), and they're augmented by flashbacks, character studies, and descriptions of the family's struggles to cope with Hannah's disappearance and the media's interest in it. Originally from a wealthy Martha's Vineyard family, Hannah emerges as unfulfilled and naive, still yearning at some romantic fantasy level for Doug, the handsome boy to whom she was originally engaged before he revealed his faithlessness. Lovell, from a semirural background in Maine, now wholly immersed in his work, couldn't believe his luck when Hannah accepted his proposal--"She was light years out of his league"--but that was before the marriage turned sexless and sour. A pall of unhappiness hangs over the story as the weaknesses of the marriage, Hannah's equivocal feelings, and the doomed nature of events (gradually revealed in chapters narrated from Hannah's point of view on that fateful day) are examined. While Lovell is a gloomy central character and Janine is insolent and disdainful in her teenage distress, Pitlor lays a closing gleam of compassion over them all. A technically accomplished but largely downbeat tale of miserable people learning life lessons late. 256pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2015. |
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Library Journal | 04/15/2015 |
Lovell and Hannah Hall are an odd couple, and not in an amusing way. Pretty and fun-loving Hannah has been somewhat spoiled by her wealthy parents. Lovell, whom she married on the rebound from a boyfriend who was wild and impulsive, is everything she is not: an introspective climate scientist who hides his feelings. Over the years, their relationship has become cold and distant, with their two children apparently not enough to hold them together. Finances are tight, and Hannah is beginning to feel trapped and restless. After a particularly nasty argument with Lovell, she disappears from their home in the Boston suburbs, and he is left scrambling for clues to her abrupt departure while trying to keep the family from splintering further as they await news of Hannah. VERDICT This spellbinding novel of suspense from the author of The Birthdays is told with great sympathy, as tension builds toward an inexorable conclusion. It can also be read as a cautionary tale both about a failed marriage and about how one impulsive decision can lead to a very dark place. Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA. 256p. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2015. |
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9781616203689,dl.it[0].title
Review Citations |
New York Times Book Review | 05/31/2015 |
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