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The Promise of a Normal Life

A Novel

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

$47.99

Hardback

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English
Arcade Publishing
16 May 2023
For readers of Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, and Katie Kitamura, the indelible journey of a quiet young woman-the ""silent person"" in the Seder-finding her way.

Hailed as ""radiant and transporting"" (Margot Livesey), The Promise of a Normal Life is a poet's debut novel, so evocative of life as lived that ittransports you to a time and place you can practically see, touch, and feel. The unnamed narrator is a fiercely observant, introverted Jewish-American girl who seems to exist in a private and separate realm. She's the child of a first-generation doctor and lawyer-whose own stories have the loud grandeur of family legend-in an America where Jews are excluded from the country club across the street. Her expectations for adulthood are often contradictory. In the changing landscape of the 1960s, she attempts to find her way through the rituals of life, her geography expanding across the country, across the ocean, and into multiple nations.

Along the way, she meets a glamorous hairdresser on a cruise ship to Israel, loopy tarot-card-reading passengers, and Alice-in-Wonderland lawyers in Haifa. There's a blue-eyed all-American college boyfriend, a mystified tourist agent in the Lofoten Islands, a handsome eligible rabbi in LA, a righteous and self-absorbed MIT professor, and a clandestine, calculating lover in Boston. Eventually, she finds her own compass, but only after being swept to several distant shores by many winds.
By:  
Imprint:   Arcade Publishing
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 210mm,  Width: 140mm,  Spine: 33mm
Weight:   392g
ISBN:   9781956763331
ISBN 10:   1956763333
Pages:   288
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson is the author of the poetry collections Girl as Birchand Opinel. Her work has appeared inSlate,Agni,the Los Angeles Review of Books,NorthwestReview,the Massachusetts Review,Tupelo Quarterly,Harvard Review,Green Mountain Review,Pleiades, and many other magazines.She taught creative writing at Tufts University for twenty-three years and has received writing fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, andthe Massachusetts Cultural Council.She lives in Marlborough, NH.

Reviews for The Promise of a Normal Life: A Novel

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson writes with a poet's precision and a novelist's sense of character as she deftly evokes her narrator's family, childhood summers, friendships, travels, and love affairs. The result is a radiant and transporting novel which carries the reader along with its wonderful sense of time and place. -Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of The Boy in The Field A liquid voice describes the tenuous journey of a young, unsure girl into womanhood. Each line is considered, tells a story unto itself. This is pure gold. -Andy Weinberger, author of the Amos Parisman Mystery Series


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