The Red Book - Softcover

Deborah Copaken Kogan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844089010 ISBN 13: 9781844089017

Publisher: Virago Press (UK), 2012

Synopsis

The Big Chill meets The Group in Deborah Copaken Kogan’s wry, lively, and irresistible new novel about a once-close circle of friends at their twentieth college reunion.

Clover, Addison, Mia, and Jane were roommates at Harvard until their graduation in 1989. Clover, homeschooled on a commune by mixed-race parents, felt woefully out of place. Addison yearned to shed the burden of her Mayflower heritage. Mia mined the depths of her suburban ennui to enact brilliant performances on the Harvard stage. Jane, an adopted Vietnamese war orphan, made sense of her fractured world through words.

Twenty years later, their lives are in free fall. Clover, once a securities broker with Lehman, is out of a job and struggling to reproduce before her fertility window slams shut. Addison’s marriage to a writer’s-blocked novelist is as stale as her so-called career as a painter. Hollywood shut its gold-plated gates to Mia, who now stays home with her four children, renovating and acquiring faster than her director husband can pay the bills. Jane, the Paris bureau chief for a newspaper whose foreign bureaus are now shuttered, is caught in a vortex of loss.

Like all Harvard grads, they’ve kept abreast of one another via the red book, a class report published every five years, containing brief autobiographical essays by fellow alumni. But there’s the story we tell the world, and then there’s the real story, as these former classmates will learn during their twentieth reunion weekend, when they arrive with their families, their histories, their dashed dreams, and their secret yearnings to a relationship-changing, score-settling, unforgettable weekend.

About this title

About the Author:

Deborah Copaken Kogan worked as a photojournalist from 1988 to 1992, and her photographs appeared in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, L'Express, Liberation, and Geo, among many other international newspapers and magazines. She spent the next six years in TV journalism, including a time as a producer for Dateline NBC. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times and elsewhere. She is a Harvard alumna. She lives in New York City with her husband, Paul Kogan, and their three children.

From Booklist:

Four college roommates from Harvard’s class of 1989 head to their 20-year reunion with partners, spouses, children, and plenty of emotional baggage in tow. Coming from wildly diverse backgrounds, Clover, Addison, Jane, and Mia have continued on divergent postgraduate tracks. From one woman’s dreams of an independent art career stifled by her husband’s writing job to another’s acting ambitions overshadowed by the demands of motherhood, the women take this opportunity to realize how their college dreams have slowed, shifted, or disappeared entirely while new opportunities have opened up. Author Kogan does an admirable job of giving her diverse group uniquely personal narration styles, and some refreshingly comic scenes break up expected swaths of reflective nostalgia. Kogan’s commitment to her characters is evident in this sweeping novel, where remembrances of things past mingle with the characters’ excitement and unease at what their futures hold. For readers who enjoyed Jennifer Close’s Girls in White Dresses (2011) or Meg Waite Clayton’s The Four Ms. Bradwells (2011), this snappy, empathetic portrait of past regrets, settled scores, and shared history is an engaging read. --Stephanie Turza

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago Press (UK)
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1844089010
• ISBN 13: 9781844089017
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368