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Viking
March 2019
On Sale: March 5, 2019
320 pages ISBN: 0525522719 EAN: 9780525522713 Kindle: B07DMYR5GS Hardcover / e-Book
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Literature and Fiction
A vibrant and perceptive novel about a father's plot to
win back his children's inheritance Arthur Alter is in trouble. A middling professor at a
Midwestern college, he can't afford his mortgage, he's
exasperated his much-younger girlfriend, and his kids won't
speak to him. And then there's the money--the small fortune
his late wife, Francine, kept secret, which she bequeathed
directly to his children. Those children are Ethan, an anxious recluse living off his
mother's money on a choice plot of Brooklyn real estate, and
Maggie, a would-be do-gooder trying to fashion herself a
noble life of self-imposed poverty. On the verge of losing
the family home, Arthur invites his children back to St.
Louis under the guise of a reconciliation. But in doing so,
he unwittingly unleashes a Pandora's box of age-old
resentments and long-buried memories--memories that orbit
Francine, the matriarch whose life may hold the key to
keeping them together. Spanning New York, Paris, Boston, St. Louis, and a small
desert outpost in Zimbabwe, The Altruists is a darkly
funny (and ultimately tender) family saga that confronts the
divide between baby boomers and their millennial offspring.
It's a novel about money, privilege, politics, campus
culture, dating, talk therapy, rural sanitation, infidelity,
kink, the American beer industry, and what it means to be a
"good person."
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