This Book Will Save Your Life

Product Information

Richard, the wealthy protagonist whose life feels meaningless until he begins rescuing other people from their problems, is likeable. I’m in the car, I’m doing dishes, I’m waiting at the dentist ( 25 minutes after my scheduled appointment time. It’s a tale of paranoid fantasies and crippling doubts, of shady lawyers and dangerous cult leaders, of billionaire gun nuts and survivalist superheroes, of weirdos, heroes, and ordinary citizens going off the grid.

It is equally the story of the myriad of characters that are similarly finding their way and shaping each other’s lives in the process – memorably, Anhil, the jewish doughnut maker, Cynthia the under appreciated house wife, Nic, the somewhat feral novelist, and Richard’s coming of age son Ben. The horse is suspicious—he wants to come out, he starts to come out, but something keeps him in the hole. In the title story, a Holocaust survivor taps into a theme of the collection when he describes the way people hold the history of previous generations inside them. Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

richard panik atak geçiriyor, yarık büyüyor, içine at düşüyor, hollywood yıldızı komşu helikopterle kurtarıyor, manavda ağlayan bir kadınla kanka oluyor, kadının kocasıyla yumruklaşıyor, kaçırılan bir kızı kurtarıyor, evden taşınması gerekiyor, arabasını donut’çuya ödünç veriyor, yeni taşındığı evde meğer abd’nin en ünlü senaristiyle komşu oluyor vs. We are introducted to Richard Novak, a reclusive, wealthy middle-aged man living in Los Angeles who pretty much doesn't need to leave his house anymore - he has his trainer, his housekeeper and his nutritionist to keep him going. Richard goes inside, raids his sock drawer for what he thinks look like decent horse earplugs, goes into the bathroom, takes the belt from his bathrobe and hurries out, walkie-talkie in hand. Only in the last third of the novel, when Richard's 17-year-old son arrives after many years of separation, does the story make an emotional connection that doesn't seem contrived. For what seemed like a light-hearted romp, turned out to be a forensic examination and rumination of this reader’s own life.

We need a few things, old socks—to use as earplugs for the horse—and something to use as a blindfold," the movie star says over his head-set. Richard, in mending his relationship with his teenage son, “feels the full weight of the years he missed, the gap between how he is and how he wishes he could be…” Homes expertly reveals our common vulnerabilities, unashamedly and candidly puts emotion under the microscope. A confession: I am that person who talks to strangers in elevators, who stops crying people on the street and asks if they’re OK, who offers to help an old person home with their groceries. Homes’s keen ear for speech—surreal as her characters’ conversations often are—lends itself to varying degrees of self-aware misunderstanding, highlighting the complexity of language and the challenges . It] is the searing precision of her language and her profound and thorny concerns that infuse these unpredictable tales with their unnerving power .A friend of mine once found an old man bewildered and freezing in Sefton Park, spent the evening trying to find his house for him and was later arrested for attempted abduction and mugging. If you're as isolated and disconnected as Richard, you'll find the details here surprising and hilarious, but otherwise, it's yesterday's news. Listening to Anhil expound on the perpetual dissatisfaction of Americans always on the go, Novak finally takes the time to smell the coffee.