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Knopf
July 2010
On Sale: June 22, 2010
352 pages ISBN: 030727070X EAN: 9780307270702 Hardcover
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Fiction Family Life
David Pepin has been in love with his wife, Alice, since the
moment they met in a university seminar on Alfred Hitchcock.
After thirteen years of marriage, he still can’t imagine a
remotely happy life without her—yet he obsessively
contemplates her demise. Soon she is dead, and David is both
deeply distraught and the prime suspect. The detectives investigating Alice’s suspicious death have
plenty of personal experience with conjugal enigmas: Ward
Hastroll is happily married until his wife inexplicably
becomes voluntarily and militantly bedridden; and Sam
Sheppard is especially sensitive to the intricacies of
marital guilt and innocence, having decades before been
convicted and then exonerated of the brutal murder of his wife. Still, these men are in the business of figuring things out,
even as Pepin’s role in Alice’s death grows ever more
confounding when they link him to a highly unusual hit man
called Mobius. Like the Escher drawings that inspire the
computer games David designs for a living, these complex,
interlocking dramas are structurally and emotionally
intense, subtle, and intriguing; they brilliantly explore
the warring impulses of affection and hatred, and pose a
host of arresting questions. Is it possible to know anyone
fully, completely? Are murder and marriage two sides of the
same coin, each endlessly recycling into the other? And
what, in the end, is the truth about love? Mesmerizing, exhilarating, and profoundly moving, Mr. Peanut
is a police procedural of the soul, a poignant investigation
of the relentlessly mysterious human heart—and a first novel
of the highest order.
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