โTheroux possesses a fabulously nasty sense of humor.โ โ Stephen King, New York Times Book Review
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To those in her Cape Cod town, Mother is an exemplar of piety, frugality, and hard work. To her husband and seven children, she is a selfish, petty tyrant. She excels at playing her offspring against each other. Her favorite, Angela, died in childbirth; only Angela really understands her, she tells the others. The others include the officious lawyer, Fred; the uproarious professor, Floyd; a pair of inseparable sisters whose devotion to Mother has consumed their lives; and JP, the narrator, a successful writer whose work she disparages. As she lives well past the age of one hundred, her brood struggles with and among themselves to shed her viselike hold on them.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย Mother Land is a piercing portrait of how a parentโs narcissism impacts a family. While the particulars of his tale are unique, Paul Theroux encapsulates with acute clarity and wisdom a circumstance that is familiar to millions of readers.
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โPaul Theroux ladles a steaming cup of dysfunctional-family chowder in Mother Land.โ โ Vanity Fair
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โAn engrossing, emotionally tangled and often merciless examination of family and self . . . Mother Land is a bittersweet, brutally frank family saga that offers enough redemption to make the journey worth it.โ โ Shelf Awareness