East End Books Ptown presents: Adrienne Brodeur "Little Monsters" in Conversation w/Cynthia Newberry Martin "The Art of Her Life" - East End Books Ptown 8/1 @ 6pm
Little Monsters
Ken and Abby Gardner lost their mother when they were small and they have been haunted by her absence ever since. Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them mostly on his own in his remote home on Cape Cod, where the attachment between Ken and Abby deepened into something complicated--and as adults their relationship is strained. Now, years later, the siblings' lives are still deeply entwined. Ken is a successful businessman with political ambitions and a picture-perfect family and Abby is a talented visual artist who depends on her brother's goodwill, in part because he owns the studio where she lives and works.
As the novel opens, Adam is approaching his seventieth birthday, staring down his mortality and fading relevance. He has always managed his bipolar disorder with medication, but he's determined to make one last scientific breakthrough and so he has secretly stopped taking his pills, which he knows will infuriate his children. Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are both harboring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the periphery of the family--Steph, who doesn't make her connection known. As Adam grows more attuned to the frequencies of the deep sea and less so to the people around him, Ken and Abby each plan the elaborate gifts they will present to their father on his birthday, jostling for primacy in this small family unit.
Set in the fraught summer of 2016, Little Monsters is a "smart, page-flipping novel...[with] shades of Succession" ( The Boston Globe) from a writer who knows Cape Cod inside and out--its Edenic lushness and its snakes.
Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the memoir Wild Game, which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and The Washington Post and is in development as a Netflix film. She founded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, and currently serves as executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute. She splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod, where she lives with her husband and children.
Cynthia Newberry Martin
is the author of three novels—The Art of Her Life (2023), Love Like This (2023), and Tidal Flats (2019), which won the Gold Medal in Literary Fiction at the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards and the 14th Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Fiction. She’s also the editor of the How We Spend Our Days series, over a decade of essays by writers on their lives, published on her website and also on Substack. She grew up in Atlanta and now lives in Columbus, Georgia, with her husband, and in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in a little house by the water.
