Livid

by Cai Emmons

Overview

Sybil White Brown returns from Boston to the small West Coast city where she once lived, hoping to heal after a terrible loss. Summoned to jury duty, she is dismayed to be assigned to the jury of a murder trial alongside her ex-husband with whom she had a rancorous divorce. As the trial progresses, she and her ex tiptoe around each other but eventually become disastrously entangled. Meanwhile, Sybil obsesses about the female defendant, whom she believes is innocent. The situation explodes during jury deliberations when Sybil comes face-to-face with her own unexpressed rage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636280769
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	09/27/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Cai Emmons is the author of five books of fiction, as well as the novels Sybil’s Trials and Unleashed, both forthcoming in 2022. Winner of the Oregon Book Award, the Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest, a Nautilus Award, and finalist for the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize as well as the Narrative Magazine Fiction Prize, her essays and stories have appeared in such publications as TriQuarterly, LitHub, Electric Literature, The LA Times, and Ms. Magazine. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale College, Emmons holds MFA degrees in film and fiction. She has taught at several colleges and universities, mostly recently in the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Editorial Reviews

Emmons’ story pulls in the reader from the very first chapter: a woman, a lawyer, is accused of murdering and mutilating her husband. A second woman sits on her jury, alongside her ex-husband, a man she hasn’t had contact with for several years. What follows is a riveting, provocative tale about women, and anger, and how nothing is ever what it truly seems to be. Mostly though, the novel is a classic page-turner that riffs on the nature of guilt and love and trust and truth. It’s a book you find yourself thinking about long after reading the final page.” —Whitney Otto, best-selling author of How to Make an American Quilt 

"A page-turning tale of love and loss, guilt and innocence, and those pivotal life moments where everything changes." —Lisa Genova, author of the best-selling novel Still Alice

“Cai Emmons has an exquisite ability to delve into the inner life of her characters. Sybil the narrator has a confiding voice that we trust, even as we recognize that she is both perceptive and blinkered. The murder trial for which she is a juror has stirred an obsessive fascination with the defendant, and the stakes are further raised when Sybil’s former husband is also seated on the jury, hurtling her into a vortex of memories and feelings. The vivid and precise writing from one surprising page to the next is a rare treat. Hair on Fire is as nuanced and graceful a novel as I have read in a long while.” —Katharine Weber, author of Jane of Hearts and Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

"'Livid' also features a mother-daughter relationship, but it confronts the long-term rage that simmers in many women as they come to understand how misogyny and racism have constricted their lives." 

—Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times 

From the Publisher