Tigers in Red Weather: A Novel

Overview

Nick and her cousin Helena grew up in a world of sun bleached boat docks, tennis whites, and midnight gin parties at Tiger House, the family home on Martha's Vineyard. In the wake of the Second World War, the two women are on the cusp of starting their "real lives": Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage to the charismatic Avery Lewis, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own husband, Hughes Derringer, about to return from the war. The world seems rife with ...
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Tigers in Red Weather

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Overview

Nick and her cousin Helena grew up in a world of sun bleached boat docks, tennis whites, and midnight gin parties at Tiger House, the family home on Martha's Vineyard. In the wake of the Second World War, the two women are on the cusp of starting their "real lives": Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage to the charismatic Avery Lewis, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own husband, Hughes Derringer, about to return from the war. The world seems rife with possibility.

The gilt soon begins to crack. Avery is not the man he seems to be, and Hughes has grown distant, his inner light curtained over. On the brink of the 1960s, Nick and Helena-with their children Daisy and Ed-try to recapture that earlier sense of possibility. But then Daisy and Ed discover something truly awful, and the dark thread of the family's history slowly starts to unravel. The secrets and lies that each member thought long buried begin to surface.

Brilliantly told with the tempestuous elegance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the suspenseful dark longing of Patricia Highsmith, Tigers in Red Weather is an almost unbearably compelling story of liars, lust, and secrets. It heralds the arrival of a fierce literary talent.

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Editorial Reviews

USA Today
"With echoes of Nancy Drew murder mysteries and The Great Gatsby that extend well beyond the names Nick and Daisy-plus allusions to Wallace Stevens, to which it owes its abstruse title-TIGERS IN RED WEATHER is a deftly constructed, suspenseful family melodrama that exposes the dark innards of privilege."
Dailycandy
"[A] steamy epic..."
Sara Vilkomerson
"[Klaussmann's]...sharp observations and lyrical prose make for a poignant read."
Megan Abbott
"Shot through with glamour and the glint of family secrets, TIGERS IN RED WEATHER has you immediately in its clutches. Intensely evocative, it is by turns unbearably febrile and utterly chilling, and often both at once."
Ron Charles
"Exceedingly clever.... An elegant playbook on passive aggression, a study of the desires and resentments that burn away souls behind teeth-clenched smiles... Klaussmann is a master at unexpressed despair."
Laura Miller
"TIGERS IN RED WEATHER has the irresistible, opiate undertow of a fine Southern gothic novel; it's best read in long, languid, effortless pulls."
Susan Cheever
"A complex, ambitious, and dramatic novel about the rich at the beach."
Maria Semple
"With sultry prose and a sure hand for suspense, Liza Klaussmann expertly weaves a vivid tale of glamour and despair, fidelity and betrayal, secrets and abandon. TTIGERS IN RED WEATHER will have you furiously postponing all human interaction until its gripping finale."
Antonina Jedrzejczak
"Tennessee Williams knew it; so did Harper Lee. There's something about a story anchored in the summer months that makes deception a little juicier, desire a little sultrier, and murder just a little more wicked. Brimming with all three, Liza Klaussmann's skillfully constructed debut novel of family intrigue and restless secrets...arrives this summer as a riveting addition to the genre.... Klaussmann's full-bodied prose considers the shortcomings of intimacy and the pitfalls of searching for an overarching family truth-all with the seductive pull of a Gothic melodrama."
Helen Rogan
"[Klaussmann's] cooked up a deft, nasty plot."
Rochelle O'Gorman
"Zings with insight.... Klaussmann boldly uses five points of view to reveal the quiet desperation, hidden mental illness and politely bared fangs in a generation adrift in privileged mid-century America.... An intellectual and highly entertaining novel that recalls such classic writers as Fitzgerald."
Alice Fishburn
"Gothic meets Martha's Vineyard in a thriller that captures a repressed generation and claustrophobic family relations.... Klaussmann has an eye for the small gesture that detonates an emotional bomb.... Throughout, [she] questions how to navigate a postwar world, and where women, specifically Nick and her aspirations, fit into it. She writes beautifully about this struggle.... A sharply drawn portrait of life among that ever-popular literary demographic: the beautiful and damned."
Rory O'Connor
"A riveting, deeply moving tale of the unraveling of one family's mysteries."
Melanie Smith
"An astounding debut and undoubtedly one of the best books of the year."
Ilana Teitelbaum
"A suspenseful story that is by turns a mystery, an examination of a marriage and an exploration of the possibly fatal consequences of self-deception."
Cynthia Wolfe Boynton
"A richly crafted story in which the setting is as much a character as those who inhabit it.... Klaussmann has created an exquisite and evocative story of family secrets that leaves the reader exhausted, exhilarated and, in tiger fashion, roaring for more."
Emily Temple
"A sultry, pitch-perfect literary thriller..."
Bette-Lee Fox
"A meditation on love, desire, and personal choices, this rich and compelling literary debut novel by a former New York Times journalist and the great-great-great-granddaughter of Herman Melville is sure to appeal to a variety of readers."
Paula McLain
"With palpable tension and spot-on sensual detail, Liza Klaussmann shows us a family in the exacting wake of the Second World War. Marvelously plotted and deliciously sophisticated, this is a book I'll be raving about for a good long while!"
Sam Sacks
"Ms. Klaussmann's strongest suit is the cut-glass quality of her prose, which presents the characters' perceptions in bold contours while still suggesting their emotional fragility."
Gabriel Byrne
"This novel is a page-turner in that you can't wait to see what happens next, yet you have to put it down from time to time to think about and savor what you've just read. It's written from the point of view of five characters, and at its center is a very unsettling mystery-it stays with you long after you've read it."
The Oprah Magazine O
"Enthralling..."
Publishers Weekly
Set in bucolic, hoity-toity post-WWII Martha’s Vineyard, this unnerving literary thriller from the great-great-great-granddaughter of Herman Melville finds a family unmoored by an unsolved murder in their apparently porcelain community. At the debut novel’s center are two woman, Nick and Helena, cousins who grew up spending summers at their family’s cushy lakeside estate. Once carefree girls, now jaded women, they’ve since returned to Tiger House with their families, but their lives have lost much of the rosy glow they had before the murder. Selfish and aloof, Nick can’t stay faithful to her husband, the devoted but emotionally stunted Hughes. Helena, living apart from her sycophantic filmmaker husband, prefers pills and booze to dealing with her poor excuse for a relationship. Meanwhile, Nick and Hughes’s surprisingly well-adjusted daughter, Daisy, is engaged to a man with not so subtle designs on her nearly acquiescent mother, while Ed, Daisy’s childhood confidant and Helena’s creepy son, is hell-bent on ensuring Daisy is treated with respect, no matter what the cost. Told from the biased and often unreliable perspectives of each of these five players, Klaussmann’s carefully crafted soap opera skillfully commingles mystery with melodrama, keeping readers guessing about what really happened until the end. While her characters’ duplicitous behavior will elicit strong reactions, Ed’s psychological progression is the most fascinating to watch. The shocking finale, seen through Ed’s all-knowing eyes, scintillates as much as it satisfies. Agent: Caroline Wood, the Felicity Bryan Agency. (July 17)
Paula McLain
"With palpable tension and spot-on sensual detail, Liza Klaussmann shows us a family in the exacting wake of the Second World War. Marvelously plotted and deliciously sophisticated, I'll be raving about this book for a good long while!"
--Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife
Maria Semple
"With sultry prose and a sure hand for suspense, Liza Klaussmann expertly weaves a vivid tale of glamour and despair, fidelity and betrayal, secrets and abandon. Tigers in Red Weather will have you furiously postponing all human interaction until its gripping finale."
--Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Library Journal
Along with a particularly evocative title and cover, this book has a red-hot plot. Having long summered together at Tiger House, the family estate on Martha's Vineyard, Nick and her cousin Helena go their separate ways: Nick with her husband, back from World War II, and newly married Helena to Hollywood. Alas, life never stays golden. Nick's husband has been snuffed out emotionally by the war, while Helena's is not what she had thought. The cousins meet at Tiger House to reassess, but a nasty murder throws their expectations further into turmoil. Lots of buzz for first novelist Klaussmann, a New York Times reporter, with a two-book deal, a huge advance, and rights sold to 18 territories and counting. Don't miss.
Kirkus Reviews
Postwar marriage and motherhood are more complicated than two cousins expected in Klaussmann's smart, unsettling debut. In September 1945, Nick and Helena are drinking gin in their backyard in Cambridge, Mass., looking forward to the end of rationing and the beginning of their adult lives. Helena is headed for Hollywood to marry Avery Lewis, Nick to Florida to be reunited with her Navy veteran husband, Hughes Derringer. Part I chronicles that less-than-successful reunion from Nick's point of view, then moves back to Cambridge as both women become pregnant in 1947. Tiger House, Nick's family home on Martha's Vineyard, sees a turbulent summer in 1959 when Nick's daughter Daisy (this section's viewpoint character) and Helena's son Ed discover the corpse of a Portuguese maid. We eventually find out who killed Elena Nunes, but the focus is on simmering tensions within and between the two families as the narrative moves into the 1960s and expands to include Helena's, Hughes' and Ed's perspectives. Restless Nick has casual flings that make both Hughes and her unhappy. Avery, obsessed with a dead movie star, gets Helena hooked on pills and pimps her out to a producer. Passive-aggressive Helena, instead of dumping Avery, blames all her problems on the admittedly bossy Nick and encourages creepily detached Ed to resent Nick too. Daisy gets engaged to a young man who seems far too interested in her glamorous mother. Developments in the Lewis family strain credulity, but Klaussmann's pitch-perfect portrait of the Derringer marriage gives the novel a strong emotional charge. Nick is frustrated by life as a decorative appendage; Hughes is uneasily aware that the part of himself he's always held in reserve has something to do with her infidelities. Their complicated, painfully loving relationship and their mutual tenderness for fresh-faced Daisy ring true, while the odysseys of Helena and Ed clang with melodrama. Uneven, but stinging dialogue and sharp insights offer strong foundations on which this novice author can build.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780316211321
  • Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
  • Publication date: 6/18/2013
  • Pages: 384
  • Sales rank: 137,993

Meet the Author

Liza Klaussmann worked as a journalist for the New York Times for over a decade. She received a BA in Creative Writing from Barnard College, where she was awarded the Howard M. Teichman Prize for Prose. She lived in Paris for ten years and she recently completed with distinction an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, in London, where she lives. She is the great-great-great granddaughter of Herman Melville.
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Interviews & Essays

1. Does Tigers in Red Weather have a main character? If so, who do you think it is?

2. What does the murder represent in the novel? Does it have equal impact on all of the characters?

3. Is Nick a heroine or villain? Do you believe her assertion that she didn't have an affair with Tyler? Does she really love Daisy, or does she resent her?

4. What brings about Hughes's newfound feelings for Nick later in the novel? Is there a specific catalyst?

5. Hughes finds Ed's behavior disturbing throughout the novel, but it's not just the boy's actions he's threatened by. How does Ed's way of thinking, and the knowledge he's accumulated, threaten Hughes's relationships and his world?

6. Why is the first-person used only in Ed's section?

7. Tigers in Red Weather is divided into five sections, each focused on a different character. Which sections did you enjoy most and least, and why? What do you think we're meant to feel about each of the characters? How does the author show us that some-thing is off about Ed long before his first-person narration grants us a window into his psyche?

8. Why does Helena stay with Avery, despite her unhappiness?

9. Why is so much of Daisy's character told from a child's point of view? What does that say about her role in the novel?

10. On page 134, after witnessing Tyler and Peaches kiss, Daisy wishes she could be like Scarlett O'Hara, independent and free, and forget about Tyler, but she's also scared. When you were a child, who were your role models, literary or otherwise? What did they represent for you? Now that you're older, whom do you look up to?

11. If you ranked the characters from most to least moral, where do they stand?

12. What does the title of the book mean? How is the poem related to the story?

13. On page 298, Ed tries to explain to Hughes his hunch that people are “going about it all the wrong way.” What do you think Ed means? Which people, and what would Ed approve of as the “right” way? Why does Ed's comment so unsettle Hughes?

14. On page 351, Nick says to Hughes, “It's the strangest thing, but I have this feeling . . . Like everything . . .” And Hughes replies, “Yes. Everything is.” Complete Nick's sentence for her. What do you imagine she's trying to say? Given the circumstances, is there any other way to interpret it? Why do you think the author chose to leave this vague, and how did it affect your experience as a reader?

15. What did you make of the ending of Tigers in Red Weather? Do you think Ed is rehabilitated?

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