Wit's End: A Novel - Softcover

Fowler, Karen Joy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452290066 ISBN 13: 9780452290068

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2009

Synopsis

This “delightful and eccentric new tale”(The Boston Globe) from the bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club subverts the whodunit and gives us a thoroughly modern meta-mystery with wit, warmth, and heart.

At loose ends and weary from her recent losses—the deaths of an inventive if at times irritating father and her beloved brother—Rima Lansill comes to Wit's End, the home of her legendary godmother, bestselling mystery writer Addison Early, to regroup...and in search of answers. For starters, why did Addison name one of her characters—a murderer—after Rima's father? But Addison is secretive and feisty, so consumed with protecting her famous fictional detective, Maxwell Lane, from the vagaries of the Internet rumor that she has writer's block. As one woman searches for truth, the other struggles to control the reality of her fiction.

Rima soon becomes enmeshed in Addison's household of eccentrics: a formerly alcoholic cook and her irksome son, two quirky dog-walkers, a mysterious stalker, the tiny characters that populate Addison's dollhouse crime-scene replicas, and even Maxwell Lane himself. But, wrapped up in a mystery that may or may not be of her own creation, Rima discovers to her surprise that the ultimate solution to this puzzle is the new family she has found at the house called Wit's End.

Here, Karen Joy Fowler delivers top-notch storytelling—creating characters both oddball and endearing in a voice that is utterly and memorably her own—in this clever, playful novel about finally allowing oneself to grow up-with a dash of mystery thrown in.

About this title

About the Author

Karen Joy Fowler, a PEN/Faulkner and California Book Award winner, is the author of six novels (two of them New York Times bestsellers) and four short story collections. She has been a Dublin IMPAC nominee, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

From AudioFile

This story within a story within a story demands a clever narrator. Thankfully, Bernadette Dunne has the skill to pull it off. Twenty-nine-year-old Rima Lanisell is visiting her godmother, the famous and eccentric mystery writer Addison Early. Rima is trying to discern the truth about her late father's relationship with Addison and whether he was connected to an old murder. She's plagued by the continually blurring line between Addison's reality and her writing and with how she fits in her own skin. Bernadette Dunne's narration is crisp as she moves in and out of the past, among characters, and within email and blogs. Her strongest portrayals are those of the protagonists. Addison has an elderly, shaky, yet strong-sounding voice, and Rima's thoughts and plans have a questioning, sometimes tormented, tone. S.W. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0452290066
• ISBN 13: 9780452290068
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336