Schroder, Amity Gaige
Schroder, Amity Gaige
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Schroder
A Novel

Author: Amity Gaige

Narrator: Will Collyer

Unabridged: 7 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Twelve

Published: 02/05/2013

Synopsis

A lyrical and deeply affecting novel recounting the seven days a father spends on the road with his daughter after kidnapping her during a parental visit.

Attending a New England summer camp, young Eric Schroder-a first-generation East German immigrant-adopts the last name Kennedy to more easily fit in, a fateful white lie that will set him on an improbable and ultimately tragic course.

Schroder relates the story of Eric's urgent escape years later to Lake Champlain, Vermont, with his six-year-old daughter, Meadow, in an attempt to outrun the authorities amid a heated custody battle with his wife, who will soon discover that her husband is not who he says he is. From a correctional facility, Eric surveys the course of his life to understand-and maybe even explain-his behavior: the painful separation from his mother in childhood; a harrowing escape to America with his taciturn father; a romance that withered under a shadow of lies; and his proudest moments and greatest regrets as a flawed but loving father.

Alternately lovesick and ecstatic, Amity Gaige's deftly imagined novel offers a profound meditation on history and fatherhood, and the many identities we take on in our lives--those we are born with and those we construct for ourselves.

About Amity Gaige

Amity Gaige is the author of four previous novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, and Sea Wife. Sea Wife was a 2020 New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Mark Twain American Voice Award. Schroder was also a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of 2013 according to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, among others, and was shortlisted for UK’s Folio Prize in 2014. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages. In 2018, Amity was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. She lives in West Hartford, Connecticut, with her family and teaches creative writing at Yale.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Sally

I thought this was brilliant. Such a strange story but it is so well written and the complicated characters so fully developed I found myself simultaneously sympathetic and horrified by Erik. And heartbroken for Meadow. Although the plot is bizarre, the story is ultimately about marriage and parenth......more

Goodreads review by Karina

I am reading the galley of my sister's new novel! I predict that it's going to be huge and Brad Pitt is going to produce and star in the movie version.......more

Goodreads review by Carmen

Despite the horrible title, the uninspiring front cover picture, and the terrible blurb (on the back of the book - the blurb on GR is actually pretty decent) - this is an excellent book. It's the kind of book that from reading page one, I knew it was going to be wonderful and sat down to enjoy a gre......more

Quotes

"Complicated and nuanced . . . the novel is absorbing, with a propulsive plot and a narrator who is charming, ambivalent, and searching-a man driven by love who understands that love cannot save him."—The New Yorker

"The measure of Gaige's great gifts as a storyteller is that she persuades you to believe in a situation that shouldn't be believable, and to love a narrator who shouldn't be lovable. Seldom has such a daring concept for a novel been grounded in such an appealing character."—Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom and The Corrections

"You will not want to put this book down. You will want to read it in one big gulp. This is a bullet of a novel, aimed at our pieties about parenthood and familial love. You won't soon forget Schroder or his daughter or the sentences that bring them to life. To those who know Gaige's first two novels, it's no surprise she's produced another stunner. To those who don't, you're in for a treat."—Adam Haslett, author of Union Atlantic, and the New York Times best-selling short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here

Praise for Amity Gagie
"In this tightly-written and emotionally satisfying novel, a young couple's marriage is thrown into jeopardy by the husband's workaholic tendencies... [Gaige] is extraordinarily adept at revealing her characters' personalities in just a few words... Stirring."—New York Times Book Review on The Folded World

"The bitterness and disillusion of marriage have been thoroughly plumbed in contemporary fiction; Gaige is one of the rare novelists who is more interested in its potential for happiness and grace. A-."—Entertainment Weekly on The Folded World

"Love, marriage, and the whole damn thing-all spanned in a witty, tender first novel. With a flavor of Lorrie Moore, graceful, bright, modern writing."—Kirkus on O My Darling

"Utterly devourable...gently, and beautifully unfolds, like a gauzy curtain in an open window."—Los Angeles Times on O My Darling

"Sparkles and delights...crystalline insights into the nature of love and flashes of narrative brilliance."—Publisher's Weekly on O My Darling

"The Folded World will appeal to readers who like to dive into the muck of internal and interpersonal conflicts, and break the surface with breath born of insight and empathy. Amity Gaige's second novel lives up to the reputation she earned with her first one, as an original, compelling voice."—Chicago Tribune (Favorite Books of 2007)

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List