Robert Boswell

"A winning ensemble cast of therapists and patients make stabs at sanity in Robert Boswell's mordantly funny novel "Tumbledown."" "Vanity Fair" "" """A complicated, nuanced look at human experience and the insights into that experience contributed by people of varying kinds of intelligence." "The Washington Post" "" "A moving and often darkly hilarious meditation on sanity." "Houston Chronicle" "" "A deft twining of irony and insight on nearly every page . . . "Tumbledown "wryly mines the heartache in emotional disturbances, some present from birth and the rest brought on by the business of living." "The New York Times" "" "Within a suspenseful plot spiked with love triangles and flashbacks, Boswell renders each complex psyche and scene with magnificent precision and penetrating vision, fine-tuning our definitions of disorder and healing and deepening our perception of what it is to be normal, what it is to be human." "Booklist" (starred review) "Like a funnier "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," this story focuses on a therapist and his wild yet well-meaning patients, bumbling through life, trying to make sense of the world and one another." "O, The Oprah Magazine," Ten Titles to Pick Up Now "Boswell can write the most refreshingly old-fashioned kind of narrative: one that evokes deep sympathy for all its characters . . . All the novel's characters know that in adulthood they're supposed to settle for what could pass for a normal life. Maybe it was a C- sort of life, but that was a passing grade.' Still, they want to keep hope, wonder and love in their lives . . . Without a whiff of sentimentality, he shows exactly how elusive such balance can be." "The New York Times Book Review""

Robert Boswell's first novel since Century's Son showcases once again his "dazzling technical skill, intelligence and moral seriousness" (The New York Times Book Review) *A Library Journal "Best Indie Fiction of 2013" * At age thirty-three, James Candler seems to be well on the road to success. He's in line for a big promotion at Onyx Springs, the treatment facility where he's a therapist. He has a fianc e, a sizable house, and a Porsche. But . . . he's falling in love with another woman, he's underwater on his mortgage, and he's put his hapless best friend in charge of his signature therapeutic program. Even the GPS on his car can't seem to predict where he should turn next. And his clients are struggling in their own hilarious, heartbreaking ways to keep their lives on track. How can he help them if he can't help himself? In Tumbledown, Robert Boswell presents a large, unforgettable cast of characters who are all failing and succeeding in various degrees to make sense of our often-irrational world. In a moving narrative twist, he boldly reckons with the extent to which tragedy can be undone, the impossible accommodated.

"Century's Son" is a piercing and visionary novel that explores the surprisingly diverse lives of one midwestern American family. In the years following the suicide of their teenaged son, husband and wife Morgan and Zhenya have settled into a staid and loveless marriage. Morgan is a one-time union leader who is now happy as a simple garbageman; Zhenya is a professor at the local state university, whose balance is about to be offset by the arrival of her famous father, a Russian political dissident-cum-American cultural critic who, among other things, claims to have had the chance to murder Stalin and now celebrates his hundredth birthday.