Mailbox Monday, Oct. 12, 2015

I have been in a terrible reading slump. So it makes perfect sense that I picked up at 700+ page book at Target last week … right?

Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a wealthy Park Avenue family. He is bewildered by his strange new home and, tormented by his longing for his mother, clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that has come into his possession.

As an adult, Theo moves easily between the antiques store where he works, the drawing rooms of the rich, and the underworld of art. He is alienated, unmoored, and in love – and drawn inexorably by the power of that painting into a narrowing, dangerous circle.

And then I just joined Book of the Month (based on Beth Fish Reads’ recent recommendation) and received my first selection:

They meet in the final months of college, and by graduation, they have married. It’s 1991. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. There are lean, romantic years that follow: potluck parties in a Manhattan basement apartment; a wilting acting career that doesn’t pay the bills; a household that seems to run on good luck and good sex. A decade or so later, though, Lotto and Mathilde are on their way. He is a world-famous playwright, she is integral to his success. Their life and marriage are the envy of friends, the very definition of successful partnership.

It is with an electric thrill, then, that the reader realizes things are even more remarkable than they have seemed. In an emotionally complicated twist, the perspective shifts, and what began as a story about one extraordinary union becomes so much more. With stunning revelations and multiple threads, in prose vibrant and original, Fates and Furies is a profoundly moving, surprising, and provocative novel about the yoke joining love, art, and power, and about the influence of perception. Exquisitely imagined, it is a book that defies expectation, stirring both the mind and the heart.