Lynn Steger Strong

"What I loved most about The Float Test is the sense of place, and how the sticky, dense heat of Florida, the relentless sun, the flat roads ending at the ocean, is woven into the Kenner family's DNA. The adult children of the family--all at crisis points in their own lives--gather on the hot ground of their childhood following their mother's death, where they try to untangle decades of betrayals and sorrow, and reclaim their sense of home."-- Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello BeautifulFrom Lynn Steger Strong, critically acclaimed author of Flight, a sophisticated and layered novel about sisters, betrayal, love, and climate change, for readers of The Dutch House and The Most Fun We Ever Had.The Kenner siblings are at odds. Gathered after a major loss, each sibling needs the others more than ever--if only they could trust each other. Jenn is a harried mom struggling under the weight of family obligations. Fred is a novelist who can't write, maybe because she's lost faith in storytelling itself. Jude is a recovering corporate lawyer with her own story to tell, and a grudge against her former favorite sister, Fred. George, the baby, is estranged from his wife and harboring both a secret about his former employer and an ill-advised crush on one of his sisters' friends. When the four are reunited it's clear that much has changed between them. Equally unsettling are the changes around them; the climate of their hometown is hotter and more oppressive than ever before.A family story is, of course, only as honest as the person telling it. This family story in particular is fraught with secrets about kids and sex and jobs and why the Kenner matriarch had a gun in her underwear drawer. The biggest secret of all though is the secret of what happened between Jude and Fred to create such a rift between the two once-close middle sisters. Over the course of a sweltering Florida summer, the Kenner siblings will revisit what it means to be a family and, if they are smart and kind and lucky, come out on the other side better for having each other.A rich exploration of family, ambition, secrets, and love, The Float Test is an elegant and gripping testament to the power that family has to both nurture and destroy us from a critically acclaimed writer working at the top of her craft.

"What I loved most about The Float Test is the sense of place, and how the sticky, dense heat of Florida, the relentless sun, the flat roads ending at the ocean, is woven into the Kenner family's DNA. The adult children of the family--all at crisis points in their own lives--gather on the hot ground of their childhood following their mother's death, where they try to untangle decades of betrayals and sorrow, and reclaim their sense of home."-- Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello BeautifulFrom Lynn Steger Strong, critically acclaimed author of Flight, a sophisticated and layered novel about sisters, betrayal, love, and climate change, for readers of The Dutch House and The Most Fun We Ever Had.The Kenner siblings are at odds. Gathered after a major loss, each sibling needs the others more than ever--if only they could trust each other. Jenn is a harried mom struggling under the weight of family obligations. Fred is a novelist who can't write, maybe because she's lost faith in storytelling itself. Jude is a recovering corporate lawyer with her own story to tell, and a grudge against her former favorite sister, Fred. George, the baby, is estranged from his wife and harboring both a secret about his former employer and an ill-advised crush on one of his sisters' friends. When the four are reunited it's clear that much has changed between them. Equally unsettling are the changes around them; the climate of their hometown is hotter and more oppressive than ever before.A family story is, of course, only as honest as the person telling it. This family story in particular is fraught with secrets about kids and sex and jobs and why the Kenner matriarch had a gun in her underwear drawer. The biggest secret of all though is the secret of what happened between Jude and Fred to create such a rift between the two once-close middle sisters. Over the course of a sweltering Florida summer, the Kenner siblings will revisit what it means to be a family and, if they are smart and kind and lucky, come out on the other side better for having each other.A rich exploration of family, ambition, secrets, and love, The Float Test is an elegant and gripping testament to the power that family has to both nurture and destroy us from a critically acclaimed writer working at the top of her craft.

A stunning novel about grief, shame, art, family, and all the ways we try and fail and try again to love and care for one another, from the critically acclaimed author of Want

"Arresting and powerful, Flight examines the possibility and pain of fierce love and hope in our time of looming existential threats." -- Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers "Suspenseful, dazzling and moving." -- Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind It's December twenty-second and siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry's house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother's Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother's house, their sole inheritance. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help. With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel Want as "a defining novel of our age" (Vulture), Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends, and strangers can support each other through the gaps. Flight is a novel of family, ambition, precarity, art, and desire, one that forms a powerful next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time.

A stunning novel about grief, shame, art, family, and all the ways we try and fail and try again to love and care for one another, from the critically acclaimed author of Want

"Arresting and powerful, Flight examines the possibility and pain of fierce love and hope in our time of looming existential threats." -- Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers "Suspenseful, dazzling and moving." -- Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind It's December twenty-second and siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry's house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother's Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother's house, their sole inheritance. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help. With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel Want as "a defining novel of our age" (Vulture), Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends, and strangers can support each other through the gaps. Flight is a novel of family, ambition, precarity, art, and desire, one that forms a powerful next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time.

Named a Best Book of 2020 by Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, Vulture, The New Yorker, and Kirkus Grappling with motherhood, economic anxiety, rage, and the limits of language, Want is a fiercely personal novel that vibrates with anger, insight, and love. Elizabeth is tired. Years after coming to New York to try to build a life, she has found herself with two kids, a husband, two jobs, a PhD--and now they're filing for bankruptcy. As she tries to balance her dream and the impossibility of striving toward it while her work and home lives feel poised to fall apart, she wakes at ungodly hours to run miles by the icy river, struggling to quiet her thoughts. When she reaches out to Sasha, her long-lost childhood friend, it feels almost harmless--one of those innocuous ruptures that exist online, in texts. But her timing is uncanny. Sasha is facing a crisis, too, and perhaps after years apart, their shared moments of crux can bring them back into each other's lives. In Want, Lynn Steger Strong explores the subtle violences enacted on a certain type of woman when she dares to want things--and all the various violences in which she implicates herself as she tries to survive.

When Maya Taylor, an English professor with a tendency to hide in her books, sends her daughter to Florida to look after a friend’s child, she does so with the best of intentions; it’s a chance for Ellie, twenty and spiraling, to rebuild her life. But in the sprawling hours of one humid afternoon, Ellie makes a mistake she cannot take back. In two separate timelines—before and after the catastrophe—Maya and Ellie must try to repair their fractured relationship and find a way to transcend not only their differences but also their more troubling similarities. "[Melding] psychological insight, precise plotting and limpid prose" (Huffington Post), Lynn Steger Strong traces the anatomy of a mistake and the weight of culpability.

Maya Taylor, an intense, gifted English professor, has a tendency to retreat when she is needed most, escaping on long morning runs or finding comfort in the well-thumbed novels in her library. But when she sends her daughter Ellie to Florida to care for a friend’s child, it’s with the best of intentions. Twenty and spiraling, Ellie is lost in a fog of drugs and men—desperately in need of a fresh start. Her life with this attractive new family in Florida begins well, but Ellie is crippled by the fear that she’ll only disappoint those around her . . . again. And in the sprawling hours of one humid afternoon, she finally makes a mistake she cannot take back. The accident hangs over both mother and daughter as they try to repair their fractured relationship and find a way to transcend not only their differences but also their more startling similarities. In Maya’s and Ellie’s echoing narratives, Lynn Steger Strong creates a searing, unforgettable portrait of familial love and the tender heartache of motherhood—from the sweltering Florida heat to the bone-cold of New York in January. Churning toward one fateful day in two separate timelines, Hold Still is a story of before and after and the impossible distance in between. Heralding the arrival of a profoundly moving new talent, this novel marks a taut and propulsive debut that “builds to a perfect crescendo, an ending that is both surprising and true” (Marcy Dermansky). Hold Still explores the weight of culpability and the depths and limits of a mother’s love. “Hold Still is an unblinking examination of family, the mother-child bond, and the storms it must withstand. Lynn Strong pulls no punches in considering not just how deep, but also how misguided a mother’s love can be.”—Elisa Albert, author of After Birth