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In this brilliant, luminous novel, one
of our finest realist writers gives us a story of surpassing
depth and emotional power. Acclaimed for her lucid and compassionate
exploration of the American family, Roxana Robinson sets her
new work on familiar terrain—New York City and the Adirondacks—but
with Sweetwater she transcends the particulars of
the domestic sphere with a broader, more encompassing vision.
In this poignant account of a young widow and her second marriage,
Robinson expands her scope to include the larger natural world
as well as the smaller, more intimate one of the home.
Isabel Green’s marriage to Paul Simmons, after the death
of her first husband, marks her reconnection to life—a
venture she’s determined will succeed. But this proves
to be harder than she’d anticipated, and the challenges
of starting afresh seem more complicated in adulthood. Staying
at the Simmons lodge for their annual summer visit, Isabel
finds herself entering into a set of familial complexities.
She struggles to understand her new husband, his elderly,
difficult parents and his brother, whose relationship with
Paul seems oddly fraught. Furthermore, her second marriage
begins to cast into sharp relief the troubling echoes of her
first. Isabel’s professional life plays a part as well:
a passionate environmental advocate, she is aware of the tensions
within the mountain landscape itself during a summer of spectacular
beauty and ominous drought.
In her cool, elegant prose, Robinson gracefully delivers a
plot that is complex, surprising and ultimately wrenching
in its impact. As the strands of family are woven tightly
and inevitably together, and as the past painfully informs
the present, the vivid backdrop of the physical world provides
its own eloquent dynamic. Sweetwater is a stunning
achievement by a writer at the peak of her craft.
Roxana Robinson is the author of
two previous novels, a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe and two
short-story collections. She has received fellowships from
the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the
Arts and the MacDowell Colony. Robinson’s fiction has appeared
in Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic,
The New Yorker, Harper’s and Vogue.
She lives in New York City and Westchester County, New York.
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