Posts tagged novel
Jack & Emily

Two young Americans meet by chance in a sun-cut village on the island of Crete in 1988, at the end of the cold war and the start of the age of terrorism. Jack is a CIA case officer, weary of his emotionally limited life and agency work. A poet and traveler, Emily has come to the end of a two-year odyssey around the Mediterranean, mourning her mother’s death. Jack’s most valued and deeply maddening asset is Ali, with a history of training foreign fighters for Osama bin Laden and an avowed double agent. Emily’s father, a British banker, Iran hand, and occasional spy who fought in Crete during the Second World War, surprises Emily by bringing to Crete his much younger second wife and their precocious five-year-old daughter. Complications follow. Jack & Emily is a spy novel, love story, and snapshot of a family saga worn about the edges.

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Hack House

Ever since they’ve been working on the Losada family’s historic Victorian house, the six members of the Lotus Painting crew have discovered something worse than manual labor. Brooding over minor annoyances, increasingly prone to fits of rage, their days and nights are troubled by strange visions and new appetites. Dieter turns to self-harm, Curtis starts stalking the Losada’s teenage son, Pete becomes obsessed with researching the house’s venomous past, and Mikey—kicked out of his mom’s place— shacks up in the attic of the Hack House.

If they knew about the painters that preceded them on the job, the crew that only lasted a single day—the fire, the self-inflicted burn—then maybe they’d look for work elsewhere. As the crew’s contagion spreads to the four members of the Losada family, they find themselves besieged from within and without, home improvement devolving into home invasion over the course of one blistering Michigan summer.

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