Know Your Beholder

A Novel

Contributors

By Adam Rapp

Formats and Prices

Price

$15.99

Price

$19.49 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around February 16, 2016. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist comes a hilarious and heartbreaking novel about a musician climbing back from rock bottom.

As winter deepens in snowbound Pollard, Illinois, thirty-something Francis Falbo is holed up in his attic apartment, recovering from a series of traumas: his mother’s death, his beloved wife’s desertion, and his once-ascendant rock band’s irreconcilable break-up. Francis hasn’t shaved in months, hasn’t so much as changed out of his bathrobe-“the uniform of a Life in Default”-for nine days.

Other than the agoraphobia that continues to hold him hostage, all he has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants, including a pair of former circus performers whose daughter has gone missing. The tight-knit community has already survived a blizzard, but there is more danger in store for the citizens of Pollard before summer arrives. Francis is himself caught up in these troubles as he becomes increasingly entangled in the affairs of others, with results that are by turns disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing.

Fusing consummate wit with the seriousness attending an adulthood gone awry, Rapp has written an uproarious and affecting novel about what we do and where we go when our lives have crumbled around us. Sharp-edged but tenderhearted, Know Your Beholder introduces us to one of the most lovably flawed characters in recent fiction, a man at last able to collect the jagged pieces of his dreams and begin anew, in both life and love. Seldom have our foibles and our efforts to persevere in spite of them been laid bare with such heart and hope.

Genre:

On Sale
Feb 16, 2016
Page Count
352 pages
Publisher
Back Bay Books
ISBN-13
9780316368926

Adam Rapp

About the Author

An acclaimed playwright, Adam Rapp was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his play Red Light Winter and a Tony Award finalist for The Sound Inside. He is the recipient of the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. In addition to his numerous plays, he is the author of the novels Know Your Beholder and The Year of Endless Sorrows and several YA novels, including Under the Wolf, Under the Dog, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. For television, he has written and produced for The L Word, In Treatment, and The Looming Tower and is currently executive producer and showrunner for American Rust: Broken Justice. Born in Chicago and raised in nearby Joliet, Illinois, Rapp now splits his time between New York City and upstate New York.

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