More News Tomorrow: A Novel

by Susan Richards Shreve

Overview

“A well-tuned mandolin of a gothic adventure.” —Washington Post

On the morning of her seventieth birthday, Georgianna Grove receives an unexpected letter that calls her back to Missing Lake, Wisconsin, where her mother was murdered sixty-six years earlier. Georgie’s father had confessed to the murder the next morning and was carted off to a state penitentiary. Determined to unearth the truth, Georgie takes her reluctant family on what will become a dangerous canoe trip up the swollen Bone River to return to the campsite that has haunted her memories. Thrilling and richly drawn, More News Tomorrow follows a daughter’s quest to finally understand her parents’ fate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393358131
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/02/2020
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Susan Richards Shreve is the author of fifteen previous novels, a memoir, and thirty books for children. She is a former president and co-chair of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, she lives in Washington, D.C

Editorial Reviews

"Violent weather, inexperienced campers and the disappearance of a child make this a potent family drama."

Star Tribune - Elfrieda Abbe

"[A] mythic journey of self-discovery, held aloft by Shreve’s silken prose."

Marilyn Stasio

"Shreve combines elements of a classic mystery novel with a contemporary psychological thriller to create a story whose surface simplicity conceals depths of emotion.… A story whose journey is as rewarding as its destination."

Shelf Awareness - Harvey Freedenberg

"One of [Shreve’s] very best books."

Elizabeth Strout

"A tightly written family drama that still manages to pack in deeper points about racism, memory, and time."

Real Simple - Elizabeth Sile

"I loved the way More News Tomorrow takes us into an elemental and unpredictable landscape, as it takes the novel of family life into new territory. It’s just superb fiction of great emotional authenticity, always finding the remarkable under what we assume."

Joan Silber

"A compelling, atmospheric family drama."

People

"With a keen sense of place and pacing, Shreve weaves a subtle and unrelenting pattern of malevolence in this portrait of a woman burdened by the sins of her father and sustained by her unshakable belief in his innocence."

Booklist

"In More News Tomorrow, Susan Richards Shreve gives us an unforgettable seventy-year-old heroine, Georgianna Grove, who takes her family and the reader on a journey back in time to solve the murder of her mother. Part mystery, part family drama, More News Tomorrow reveals the hatred of racism, the weight of history and grief, and the enormous generosity and grace of the human heart. I loved this book!"

Ann Hood

★ 2019-03-18
Dead parents haunt Shreve's 16th novel (You Are the Love of My Life, 2012, etc.).

In 2007, George Washington University professor Georgianna Grove still grapples with the mysterious tragedy that orphaned her as a small child. In 1941, when Georgianna was 4, her father, William, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, went to prison for murdering her mother on a canoe trip to the Wisconsin summer camp he ran. Four years later, William died in prison, leaving Georgianna to face a lonely childhood with unapproachable, anti-Semitic maternal grandparents. In reaction, Georgianna made the concept of "home" central to her research as an anthropologist and has continually welcomed strangers into the house where she raised her own three children. They'd become fatherless themselves at ages 4, 2, and still-in-the-womb when Georgianna's husband died in Vietnam. On her 70th birthday, Georgianna receives a letter from the only other person from the 1941 canoe trip who's still alive. At the time, Roosevelt McCrary was an 11-year-old child who had been hired, along with his mother, to work at the camp despite being black. As an adult, Roosevelt became a part owner of the camp and has retired there. Hoping he has information to exonerate William, Georgianna decides to revisit the camp and nearby murder site for the first time. She drags along her family—grown children Venus, Rosie, and Nicolas, whose work on Barack Obama's campaign hovers in the background; Rosie's 13-year-old son, Thomas, in the throes of grieving his own father's recent death; Nicolas' son, 15-year-old Jesse, and 4-year-old daughter, Oona, coincidentally Georgianna's age in 1941. Georgianna discovers that her parents' lives and deaths were more complex and mysterious than she thought and not truly knowable. Shreve creates a spooky atmosphere with stormy weather, eerie parallels between past and present, and at least one threateningly crazy woman. Even spookier is the backdrop of 20th-century racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-immigration feeling that are all too familiar today.

Part gothic novel, part adventure story, but primarily a meditation on surmounting misfortunes that may lie beyond an individual's control.

Kirkus Reviews