Mothers and Sons: A Novel

by Adam Haslett

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Haslett returns with a story about new beginnings, old grudges and complicated family ties. Mothers and Sons is perfect for fans of Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett.

A mother and son, estranged for years, must grapple with the shared secret that drove their lives apart in this enthralling story about family, forgiveness, and how a fleeting act of violence can change a life forever, by "one of the country's most talented writers" (Wall Street Journal)

At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of immigrants only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter's numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him.

Ann, his mother, who runs a women's retreat center she founded after leaving his father, is hurt by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built. She long ago put behind her the decision that divided her from her son. But as Peter’s case plunges him further into the fraught memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart.

With unsurpassed emotional depth, Mothers and Sons reveals all that is lost by looking away from the past and the love that might be restored by facing it. In his spellbinding new novel, Adam Haslett demonstrates yet again his mastery of “a rich assortment of literary gifts” (New York Times).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316574716
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	01/07/2025
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	27,555
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 5.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Adam Haslett is the author of the story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here and the novels Union Atlantic and Imagine Me Gone. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Berlin Prize, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently directs the MFA Program at Hunter College in New York.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

December 24, 1970

Place of Birth:

Porchester, New York

Education:

B.A., Swarthmore College, 1993; M.F.A., Iowa Writers¿ Workshop, 1999; J.D., Yale Law School, graduating May 2003

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/02/2024

Haslett’s irresistable latest (after Imagine Me Gone) revolves around the mystery of a man’s teenage trauma. Peter, a 40-year-old immigration lawyer, works on asylum seekers’ cases in New York City. In interlocking threads, Haslett delves into Peter’s work on the case of a gay Albanian immigrant and his upbringing with his mother Ann, an Episcopal priest. In the latter timeline, Peter gradually discovers his own sexuality with his stunning and mysterious friend Jared. A third story line follows Ann as she divorces Peter’s father for a woman named Clare, with whom she goes on to found a women’s retreat, Viriditas. Ann and Clare’s relationship struggles as Ann develops feelings for another woman at the retreat. Gradually, the reason for the rift between Peter and Ann—a harrowing event that happened over the course of one fateful evening during his youth—is revealed, leading to a climactic present-day confrontation between mother and son at Viriditas. Themes of guilt, new beginnings, survival, and violence permeate the excellent and subtle story of characters grappling with events beyond their control, and the author, himself an immigration lawyer, delivers a deeply personal portrait of Peter’s tenacious advocacy for his clients. This matches the heights of Haslett’s best work. Agent: Amanda Urban, CAA. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Riveting...Unfurling across multiple timelines with impressive, confident fluidity, Mothers and Sons is a powerful study of the impossibility of trying to hold back the tides of familial hurt and trauma. When the levee finally breaks, the outcome is both heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful."—Vogue

"There’s no better writer at chronicling the highs and lows of familial love. In Mothers and Sons, Haslett shows a family both torn by past trauma and battered by the social turmoil of the present…The chronicle of this complex mother and son pair satisfies one of the best reasons to read fiction: to understand others and their impossible burdens, to mourn when they stumble and celebrate when they survive."—Los Angeles Times

“This beautifully written novel about the power of stories to redeem the past and reclaim the future is itself a tapestry of such narratives."—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Well-paced and elegantly written, Haslett’s latest is a haunting work.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Mothers and Sons could not be more timely. Haslett…is one of the most psychologically astute fiction writers in America…There’s a strange tension in Haslett’s work between urgency and introspection. Try as you might, you cannot rush this novel…His prose lies on the page with the intensity of a loosely coiled copperhead; you don’t even see the camouflaged danger until it strikes. He’s a master of incident and particularly of the ordinary line that’s transformed by his pacing and placement into something altogether devastating.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post

"The echoes of the Russian greats in the title aren’t misplaced—this is an epic family saga that packs an extraordinary emotional punch."
 —The Guardian

“This deeply satisfying novel is a revelation—a thoughtful, psychologically acute, beautifully written examination of intersecting lives. The characters come alive on the page, commanding readers’ attention. This novel is sure to receive accolades, and it richly deserves them."—Booklist (starred review)

"Haslett’s storytelling skill...is on quietly magnificent display… As much as both mother and son understand about the power of stories to harm and heal, they’ve failed to reckon with their own story, and the guilt and shame each has been carrying for decades. The momentum of the novel builds as long-held misunderstandings and resentments come to the surface, illuminating the meaning of what it means to be a mother, and a son, and culminating with a great sense of a weight lifted, of lightness and air.”—Boston Globe

“Mothers and Sons” is Haslett’s best novel...he achieves new levels of moral depth and narrative push."—New York Times Book Review

“Excellent…Mr. Haslett sets up this story with a delicacy that will not surprise anyone who read his beautiful 2016 novel, Imagine Me Gone, which featured a fretful, caretaking mother and her manic-depressive son. He is particularly good at depicting the ways—often admirable, sometimes blinding—that both Ann and Peter have been shaped by their work.”—Wall Street Journal

“Mothers and Sons is both moving and deeply compelling, a story about the search for our own humanity, and the lengths we will go to maintain it. A new book by Adam Haslett is always cause for celebration. He is one of our very best writers.”—Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake and The Dutch House

“Mothers and Sons is like sonar in a lake, pinging out everything submerged, the hidden stories, the shames and the joys. There’s nothing else like it. Haslett’s characters feel so real, their choices so hard, their lives so true. He is everything you want in a writer.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times bestselling author of Less

“A family-in-crisis story that keenly captures deep-seated fears and regrets…Haslett’s sophisticated grasp of the ways that people over-police their feelings makes it a remarkably acute and effective character study."—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Irresistible…​Themes of guilt, new beginnings, survival, and violence permeate the excellent and subtle story of characters grappling with events beyond their control, and the author delivers a deeply personal portrait of Peter’s tenacious advocacy for his clients. This matches the heights of Haslett’s best work.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

12/01/2024

Peter Fischer is an immigration lawyer whose days are spent in client interviews, court appearances, and deportation hearings. His workaholic life leaves little room for romance, other than occasional hookups with forgettable men. Meanwhile, his mother, Ann, has decamped with her partner Clare to rural Vermont, where they run a retreat for women seeking healing or self-awareness. Peter and Ann lead parallel lives, but their long estrangement ends when Peter's ordered existence is upset by a new client, a young Albanian seeking refuge in the United States after being tortured and humiliated for being gay. For Peter, this asylum case awakens painful memories of his first crush on a handsome high school friend. His subsequent response forces mother and son to finally confront the past. VERDICT There is no shortage of pathos in the heartbreaking stories of Peter's clients or the accounts of abuse experienced by Ann's retreat guests. But Haslett's (Imagine Me Gone) melancholy novel finds some resolution and ends on an uplifting note for its asylum seekers, troubled women, mother, and son.—Barbara Love

Library Journal

★ 2024-09-14
An overworked immigration lawyer and his religious mother work to finally face their pasts.

Haslett’s third novel is partly narrated by Peter Fischer, a New York City lawyer working for a nonprofit handling asylum cases. There, and in the rest of his life, he handles things with assurance but little joy—his lover, Cliff, has little more depth than a dating-app hookup, and he avoids conversations with his snarky and unfiltered sister, Liz. But he’s unsettled when he takes on the case of Vasel Marku, a young gay Albanian man seeking asylum over fears he’ll face homophobic persecution. Peter’s narration of his unusually deep involvement in Vasel’s case is braided around third-person narration about his mother, Ann, who leads a women-focused spiritual retreat in Vermont with her partner, Clare. Ann’s breakup with her husband (and Peter’s father) after falling for Clare disrupted her life, and it’s clear that both mother and son have been swallowing a lot of unspoken hurt. The strength of Haslett’s storytelling is its deliberation, slowly peeling back the veneers of Peter's and Ann’s professional accomplishments and cool public personas to reveal storms of guilt and fear. The two share complex queer sexual coming-of-age stories—Peter as a teenager falling for a handsome and emotionally distant classmate, Ann as a middle-aged woman falling for a woman, shipwrecking her marriage and career as a pastor. They share losses, too—Peter’s father’s death from cancer and a withheld event that gives the novel its emotional payoff. It’s “practically mandatory,” Clare observes, for women to “hide in other people’s pain,” just as men like Peter are asked to never feel it. And though the outlines of the novel suggest sentimental family-trauma fare, Haslett’s sophisticated grasp of the ways that people over-police their feelings makes it a remarkably acute and effective character study.

A family-in-crisis story that keenly captures deep-seated fears and regrets.

Kirkus Reviews