Familiar

Description

Elisa Brown is driving back from her annual visit to her son Silas's grave. The road is flat and featureless, and so she finds herself focussing on an old crack in her windscreen. For a moment, she loses sense of all else around her. When she comes back to herself, everything has changed. The car she is driving is not the same car. Her body is more subtly changed. She's wearing different clothes. But a name badge pinned to her blouse tells her she's still Elisa Brown. When she arrives home, her life is familiar-but different. There is her house, her husband. But in the world she now inhabits, Silas is no longer dead, and his brother is disturbingly changed. Elisa has a new job, and her marriage seems sturdier, and stranger. She finds herself faking her way through a life she is convinced is not her own. Has she had a psychotic break? Or has she entered a parallel universe? She soon discovers that these questions hinge on being able to see herself as she really is-something that might be impossible for Elisa, or for anyone.

J. Robert Lennon is the author of seven novels. His fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, Harper's Magazine, the New Yorker and the LRB. Profile are publishing his novel See You in Paradise later this year. He lives in upstate New York.

So breakneck and harrowing, so grab-you-by-the-lapels astonishing, that you may not notice until nearly the end how many questions about your own life it makes you ask -- Elizabeth McCracken J. Robert Lennon's beautifully written new novel bristles with menace and suspense - a terrific and disturbing read * Daily Mail * I loved J Robert Lennon's rather spooky novel Familiar ... it's a story Hitchcock might have made -- Books of the Year 2013 * Evening Standard * Irresistible ... a meditation on family and identity likely to stir brain and heart alike * Observer * Familiar is a terrific novel: psychologically subtle and philosophically supple. It will leave you with a heightened awareness of the strange cracks and wormholes on the peripheries of life * Daily Telegraph * There won't be a better English-language novel published this year ... this is a brilliant, bruising novel about how we make our way in the world. Everyone should read it * Civilian Magazine * A literary puzzle, a marvelous trick of the mind...as tightly wound as a great Alfred Hitchcock movie. * LA Times * Tight in focus as well as in construction...an otherworldly narrative -- Leo Robson * Evening Standard * Dazzling -- Justine Jordan * Guardian * This highly convincing nightmare reads like a thriller; Lennon is painfully truthful about grief and parenthood -- Kate Saunders * Times * A writer with enough electricity to light up the country -- Ann Patchett A novel that imposes itself on the imagination from the opening sentences ... Lennon's brisk prose is both vivid and precise; the dialogue is clear and authentic, often funny. In fact, considering that this is a deadly serious, often bewildering and affecting novel, Familiar is witty and satiric. It is obvious that its genius lies in Lennon's feel for metaphysical contradictions that consistently undercut the realism ... a similar approach to the theme of parallel universes and altered experiences within shifting time frames has also been explored in novels such as Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 or Tom McCarthy's Remainder, neither of which achieves the unsettling mastery of Lennon's far shorter and infinitely superior novel, which could inspire a brilliant screenplay ... Familiar is fresh and original; it is also disturbing in its strangeness, because that strangeness is eerily real -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times * Lennon is an American writer whose novels delicately probe the psychology of their protagonists...In Familiar Lennon uses his sci-fi vehicle to create eerie fiction. The notion of parallel universes becomes a metaphor for life choices and their results...immersion in her alternate realities prompts reflection upon the aleatory nature of our own life, in all its uncanniness -- Peter Carty * Independent on Sunday * I loved J Robert Lennon's rather spooky novel Familiar...It's a story Hitchcock might have made -- William Leith * Evening Standard Books of the Year 2013 * Familiar is a terrific novel: psychologically subtle and philosophically supple. It will leave you with a heightened awareness of the strange cracks and wormholes on the peripheries of life -- Helen Brown * Daily Telegraph * What's remarkable is that in the first ten pages of his novel, Lennon has provided such a full, convincing portrait of his protagonist - the way she thinks; the way she sees the world; the people and events that most matter to her - that throughout the rest of the book, the reader shares her sense of the wrongness of the new world she finds herself in -- Thomas Jones * London Review of Books * a literary thriller masquerading as science fiction, Familiar is impossible to pigeonhole and weirdly, glitteringly brilliant -- Alison Flood * Sunday Times *