Astral

From the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of "The Great Man," a scintillating novel of love, loss, and literary rivalry set in rapidly changing Brooklyn. The Astral is a huge rose-colored old pile of an apart-ment building in the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For decades it was the happy home (or so he thought) of the poet Harry Quirk and his wife, Luz, a nurse, and of their two children: Karina, now a fer-vent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a...
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From the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of "The Great Man," a scintillating novel of love, loss, and literary rivalry set in rapidly changing Brooklyn.
The Astral is a huge rose-colored old pile of an apart-ment building in the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For decades it was the happy home (or so he thought) of the poet Harry Quirk and his wife, Luz, a nurse, and of their two children: Karina, now a fer-vent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But Luz has found (and destroyed) some poems of Harry's that ignite her long-simmering sus-picions of infidelity, and he's been summarily kicked out. He now has to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, financial, and parental failures (and perhaps oth-ers) and find his way forward--and back into Luz's good graces.
Harry Quirk is, in short, a loser, living small and low in the water. But touched by Kate Christensen's novelistic grace and acute perception, his floundering attempts to reach higher ground and forge a new life for himself become funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving. She knows what secrets lurk in the hearts of men--and she turns them into literary art of the highest order.

BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Kate Christensen's "Blue Plate Special."