Advanced
Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.
Title details for Family of Origin by CJ Hauser - Available

Family of Origin

A Novel

by CJ Hauser
Kristen Sieh
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available
*BONUS: Includes the viral essay sensation "The Crane Wife"*
"An innovative work of climate fiction, a nuanced and empathic family story, and, for my money, the summer's best novel thus far."
—NPR.org
"The most oddly enticing novel you will read this year...Keenly satirical yet unashamedly tender."
—Wall Street Journal
"Reminiscent of the family explorations of Rick Moody, Jennifer Egan, and Lauren Groff...Full of brilliantly realized characters, Hauser's latest is profound, often incredibly funny, and captures the times like few other contemporary novels."
—Booklist (starred)
When Nolan Grey receives news that his father, a once-prominent biologist, has drowned off Leap's Island, he calls on Elsa, his estranged, older half-sister, to help pick up the pieces. This, despite the fact that it was he and Elsa who broke the family in the first place. The Greys have been avoiding each other for a dozen years.
Elsa and Nolan travel to their father's field station, a wild and isolated spot off the Gulf Coast. Here, their father's fatalistic colleagues, the Reversalists, obsessively study the undowny bufflehead, a rare sea duck whose loss of waterproof feathers proves, they say, that evolution is running in reverse and humanity's best days are behind us.
On an island that is always looking backward, it's impossible for the siblings to ignore their past. Stuck together in the close quarters of their island stilt-house, and provoked by the absurd antics of the remaining Reversalists, years of family secrecy and blame between Elsa and Nolan threaten to ruin them all over again. As the Greys urgently trek the island to find the so-called Paradise Duck, their father's final obsession, they begin to fear that they were their father's first evidence that the future held no hope.
In the irreverent and exuberant spirit of Kevin Wilson, Alissa Nutting, and Karen Russell, CJ Hauser speaks to a generation's uncertainties: Is it possible to live in our broken world with both scientific pragmatism and hope? What does one generation owe another? How do we know which parts of the past, and ourselves, to jettison and which to keep? Delightfully funny, fiercely original, high-spirited and warm, Family of Origin grapples with questions of nature and nurture, evolution and mating, intimacy and betrayal, progress and forgiveness.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 16, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781984891716
      • File size: 259501 KB
      • Duration: 09:00:37

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 6, 2019
      Hauser (The From-Aways) impresses with her wistful contemporary tale of family bonds and misplaced pessimism. Estranged half-siblings 35-year-old Elsa—a discouraged second-grade teacher in Minnesota—and 29-year-old Nolan—a social media manager for the San Francisco Giants—travel to Leap’s Island, a private island off the Gulf Coast, to investigate the drowning death of their father, Ian Grey. Ian, once a respected biologist, had come to Leap’s Island to join the Reversalists, a small group of researchers who believe evolution is regressing to make each generation worse. The eccentric inhabitants jealously guard their research on the island’s unique duck species, hoping to be the first to prove the theory. Elsa is convinced Ian committed suicide, but Nolan hopes conversations with the researchers will prove her wrong. The pair fall into old patterns of sibling rivalry, and Elsa wrestles with her drastic reaction to learning what caused the family’s rupture 15 years before. Hauser intercuts the siblings’ investigation with flashbacks to their fractured earlier family life and the melancholic backstories explaining each of the Reversalists’ reason for coming to the island. This shimmering take on grief and family will enthrall fans of character-driven stories with its bevy of dashed dreams and cluttered emotions.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Loading
Check out what's being checked out right now!