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THE PAPER PALACE

by Miranda Cowley Heller ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 6, 2021

From the first pages of her debut novel, Heller pulls no punches. Some of them just sneak up on you later on.

When it comes to making the biggest decision of your life, what matters more: the events of one epic day or the events of a lifetime—though could that day have even happened without the lifetime leading up to it?

Elle Bishop has spent every summer of her 50 years at her family’s compound on Cape Cod, in the Back Woods. Ramshackle and in a constant losing battle with the elements, the beach retreat is a reassuring constant in Elle’s life, which has otherwise been marked by her parents’ divorce, a series of increasingly inappropriate parental mates, gruesome stepsiblings, and interactions with lecherous and violent men and boys. Jonas, a childhood friend of Elle’s from the Cape, served as another constant during her challenging upbringing. Elle’s day of reckoning is prompted by a sexual encounter with him—just outside a dinner party with both of their spouses in attendance—after years of a slow-burn relationship. Elle’s marriage to a man she truly loves (and the comfortable family life they've made together) is balanced against the secret-filled history she and Jonas share. Over the course of the ensuing hours, Elle narrates her day of introspection and intersperses it with flashbacks spanning the course of her whole life, with and without Jonas. The moody and atmospheric setting of the shadowy paths and ponds of the Back Woods is described in lush detail that makes a sharp contrast to the colder, sharper elements of Elle’s story. But the long-held secrets that Elle reveals and reckons with over the course of her day of decision cast the biggest shadow over her life and will inform the rest of her days.

Pub Date: July 6, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-593-32982-5

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

PERSPECTIVES

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2024

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

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by Sally Rooney

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Culture | Books

The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller review: Big Little Lies meets John Cheever

Elle Bishop, the narrator of Miranda Cowley Heller’s much hyped debut novel, does not give a good first impression. When we meet her, at her family’s Cape Cod holiday home , she appears reckless and selfish, following her desires without a second thought for anyone else.

She wakes up at 6.30am, bypasses the detritus of the previous evening’s dinner party and heads out for a swim. As she enters the freezing water, naked, she plays over the night before in her head, when she “f***ed” her childhood best friend Jonas against the wall of their house while her husband and children snoozed inside and her mother did the washing up. Cowley Heller provides a detailed, lyrical description of the honeyed air, the catch of breath in Elle’s throat, her thrumming heartbeat and the sensation of the water, all of which contrasts baldly with her crude description of the sex, “he shoved himself into me”.

But as we learn more about Elle, it becomes clear that this type of behaviour - enjoying illicit sex - is a departure for her. All her adult life she has been hiding a devastating secret about a traumatic incident in her past that has haunted her since she was a teenager. The story unfolds episodically, switching between the present day and flashbacks from Elle’s family history which creates pace and a sense of intrigue – how did she end up here?

Miranda Cowley Heller comes from New York’s literary elite. In the book’s acknowledgements, she thanks her grandfather, literary critic Malcolm Cowley, for his advice that every good story must have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the end foreshadowed in the beginning (which this story succeeds in). Her father was military historian Robert Cowley, who was married to the author John Cheever’s daughter, Susan. As in Cheever’s writing, swimming is imbued with significance here – Bishop’s mother does it daily and says you never regret a swim – and the descriptions of New England also feel comparable.

Cowley Heller has a background in TV. She was Senior Vice President and Head of Drama Series at HBO, working on The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire. It is easy to see The Paper Palace as a TV show. It has strong Big Little Lies energy – rich people plagued by neuroses in enormous houses – and the short chapters end on cliffhangers.

The writing is full of rich detail, evoking the New England landscape; the overgrown reeds and pond life, the racoons outside and the mice in the ceiling, all the wild nature contrasting with the constrictions that the humans place on their lives to control their more animal sides. The book’s title is the name of the Bishops’ cabin in the woods, so called because it is lined with paperboard. There is a strong sense of place as we go from there to New York to Vermont and London, learning about Elle’s grandmother’s estate in Guatemala, her parents’ divorce and how Elle meets her English husband Peter.

Cowley Heller has fun with Peter and his Englishness and his mother, “a classic battle-axe in pearls” who has recently taken an interest in “the moderns”. Elle’s mother Wallace makes cutting observations about Peter, like: “Brits love to drink but they make tepid, vacuous cocktails.” At first, the way Wallace speaks feels contrived, in quotes of received wisdom, telling her daughter to be like a Botticelli with Peter, smiling all the time, but you get used to her style (if occasionally as annoyed by it as Elle is; she despairs at “the banter of WASPs around alcohol”).

Deep down, you sense that Wallace knew more than she let on about the traumatic incident that happened to her daughter, but repressed it because she wanted to get on with her life. The relationship between Wallace and her daughter forms a far more convincing heart of the story than that between Elle and Jonas.

The weakest point of the novel is the writing about sex, which admittedly is difficult to get right. Here it all feels a bit Mills and Boon. Jonas, Elle’s childhood friend, has “thick black hair you can grasp in your fists” and they say things to each other like “I’ve spent my whole life waiting for this”. It just doesn’t feel believable. I also wish there was less writing about Elle’s bladder. She is always bursting for a wee at the most inconvenient time. Considering she is a grown-up woman, you would think she would have learned how to handle this better.

One other small criticism is that, as a journalist, I was somewhat confused at Peter’s credentials. He is a “respected” financial journalist but never seems to do any work and mysteriously goes to Memphis for business (not known for its finance).

That aside, if you aren’t reading as a journalist, this is an absorbing family saga packed with intrigue and complicated characters that transports you to Cape Cod. I can’t wait for the adaptation.

The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller is out now, £14.99, Penguin Viking

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Author Interviews

Love is a losing game and choice is a curse in 'the paper palace'.

Mary Louise Kelly

Vincent Acovino

Justine Kenin

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Miranda Cowley Heller about her first novel, The Paper Palace , which is set in late summer on Cape Cod — and is all about desire.

Copyright © 2021 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Inside the Best-Seller List

Everything Old Is New Again and Other Best-Selling Wisdom

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By Elisabeth Egan

• Published July 29, 2021 Updated Aug. 10, 2021

HOLDING COURT “ The Paper Palace ” is now in its third week on the hardcover fiction list , partly thanks to a boost from Reese Witherspoon’s book club, and mostly because of Miranda Cowley Heller’s irresistible placement of a complicated family in a bewitching place. Eagle-eyed readers may notice that this tale of gin-soaked backwoods Cape Cod is dedicated to the author’s grandmother Muriel Maurer Cowley, “whose fierce love never wavered.” Fun fact: Heller’s grandfather Malcolm Cowley was a renowned critic, historian, editor, poet, essayist and regular Book Review presence, who died in 1986 at the age of 90. In a 1973 item about one of Cowley’s books, “ A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation ,” William Styron quoted his take on the shape and meaning of a literary legacy: “A generation is no more a matter of dates than it is one of ideology. A new generation does not appear every 30 years. … It appears when writers of the same age join in a common revolt against the fathers and when, in the process of adopting a new lifestyle, they find their own models and spokesmen.”

CAMEO TO LOTHARIO Another tentpole of the summer’s hardcover fiction list is “ Malibu Rising ,” Taylor Jenkins Reid’s frothy-with-undertow story of four siblings who are abandoned by their swashbuckling singer dad, Mick Riva. This character makes appearances in two of Reid’s five earlier books — first as an affable pawn who gets duped into a Vegas wedding in “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” (2017), then as a partygoer in “ Daisy Jones & The Six ” (2019). Interestingly, “Evelyn Hugo” and “Malibu Rising” contain nearly identical scenes — one set in the 1960s, one in the 1980s — where a woman reaches a new level of fame after being caught on film in a wet T-shirt. Here’s hoping that Reid’s next novel transports readers to a future where this scenario seems like a threadbare relic from a bygone era.

RECENT ADDITIONS The fiction list welcomes two new thrillers this week: “Black Ice,” the 20th installment of Brad Thor’s Scot Harvath series, and Karin Slaughter’s “False Witness,” a stand-alone about a secret-harboring Atlanta defense attorney who gets dragooned into representing a wealthy man who has been accused of multiple counts of rape. As Slaughter’s epigraph — a quote from Katherine Anne Porte r — puts it, “The past is never where you think you left it.”

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Brad Thor’s thriller “Black Ice.” It is not the “final installment” of the Scot Harvath series.

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of a book by the literary critic Malcolm Cowley. It is “A Second Flowering.” It is not “Works and Days of the Lost Generation,” which is the book’s subtitle.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] . Learn more

Elisabeth Egan is an editor at the Book Review and the author of “A Window Opens.”

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