The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs, Janet Peery
The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs, Janet Peery
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The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs
A Novel

Author: Janet Peery

Narrator: Juliana Francis Kelly

Unabridged: 10 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/19/2017


Synopsis

Janet Peery’s first novel, The River Beyond the World, was a National Book Award finalist in 1996. Acclaimed for her gorgeous writing and piercing gaze into the hearts of people, Peery now returns with a new, unflinching audiobook, The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs.

On a summer evening in the blue-collar town of Amicus, Kansas, the Campbell family gathers for a birthday dinner for their ailing patriarch, retired judge Abel Campbell, prepared and hosted by their still-hale mother Hattie. But when Billy, the youngest sibling—with a history of addiction, grand ideas, and misdemeanors—passes out in his devil’s food cake, the family takes up the unfinished business of Billy’s sobriety.
Billy’s wayward adventures have too long consumed their lives, in particular Hattie’s, who has enabled his transgressions while trying to save him from Abel’s disappointment. As the older children—Doro, Jesse, ClairBell, and Gideon—contend with their own troubles, they compete for the approval of the elderly parents they adore, but can’t quite forgive.

With knowing humor and sure-handed storytelling, Janet Peery's new audiobook reveals a family at its best and worst, with old wounds and new, its fractures and feuds, and yet its unbreakable bonds.

About Janet Peery

Janet Peery is the author of Alligator Dance (stories), What the Thunder Said (a novella and stories), and the novel The River Beyond the World, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has received numerous honors for her fiction including the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Whiting Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She lives in Cape Charles, Virginia.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Sue on May 02, 2017

This is the first book that I've read by Janet Peery and I want to thank goodreads for a copy to read and review. This is a wonderful family drama that looks into the dynamics of a family and tries to help us understand why the family members act like they do. It's a family made up of parents Hattie......more

Goodreads review by Donna on December 02, 2017

The place is Amicus, Kansas; the Campbell family has come together to celebrate the birthday of their frail, ancient patriarch, Abel. Ultimately, though, their attention is drawn, unavoidably, to the youngest among them. Billy is a walking pharmacy, but he won’t be walking anywhere for much longer i......more

Goodreads review by Martie on September 28, 2017

Genre: Adult Fiction Pub. Date: September 19, 2017 Publisher: St. Martin’s Press. Tolstoy's begins “Anna Karenina” with his now famous first line of "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That opening is a fitting way to begin this review. The author, Janet Pee......more

Goodreads review by AJ on October 05, 2017

Gorgeous book! I've read all of Janet Peery's books, and I've loved them all, but I think this might be her finest. Or maybe I was just so thirsty for her sentences, with syntax so taut that they sing. It is a beautiful portrait of an adult family doing the dysfunctional dance, but it isn't just a c......more

Goodreads review by Laura (Book Scrounger) on May 28, 2017

This story is a character study about a family--elderly parents and middle-aged children--and the changes and trials they go through over the course of a couple years. The father is a type-A, "Greatest Generation" patriarch, and the mother tries to do the difficult job of keeping the oft-dysfunction......more


Quotes

"It's rare to find a book that so mercilessly, and beautifully, and honestly concerns itself with middle-aged life. With the tender, enduring, fraught relationships among aging siblings and their even more aged parents. Janet Peery is a magnificent sentence-maker and a faithful reporter of the human condition as it regards this large and flawed and recognizable -- so recognizable -- midwestern family. I will gift everyone I know with a copy of The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs, just because it has such important confirmation to bestow upon us." --Antonya Nelson, author of Talking in Bed and Funny Once

"Piercingly observant of the minutia that make life meaningful, Janet Peery paints a portrait in The Exact Nature of our Wrongs of a family both unmistakably familiar and unforgettably unique, one that will stay with you for a while. This is a richly accomplished, novel by a writer as wryly funny as she is wise." --Josh Weil, author of The Great Glass Sea and The New Valley

"A masterpiece. One of the wisest, most nuanced evocations of the hopeless quandary of family relations--the trying to understand, to get along, the failure and the suffering--and yet the grace of it, too." --Blake Bailey, author of Cheever: A Life