book cover of The Misfortune of Marion Palm
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The Misfortune of Marion Palm

(2017)
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A wildly entertaining debut about a Brooklyn Heights wife and mother who has embezzled a small fortune from her children's private school and makes a run for it, leaving behind her trust fund poet husband, his maybe-secret lover, her two daughters, and a school board who will do anything to find her.

Marion Palm prefers not to think of herself as a thief but rather "a woman who embezzles." Over the years she has managed to steal $180,000 from her daughters' private school, money that has paid for European vacations, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and perpetually unused state-of-the-art exercise equipment. But, now, when the school faces an audit, Marion pulls piles of rubber-banded cash from their basement hiding places and flees, leaving her family to grapple with the baffled detectives, the irate school board, and the mother-shaped hole in their house. Told from the points of view of Nathan, Marion's husband, heir to a long-diminished family fortune; Ginny, Marion's teenage daughter who falls helplessly in love at the slightest provocation; Jane, Marion's youngest who is obsessed with a missing person of her own; and Marion herself, on the lam--and hiding in plain sight.


Genre: General Fiction

Praise for this book

"There are only two questions regarding The Misfortune of Marion Palm: Do you read it quickly or do you read it slowly? You'll want to race through it and yet there is brilliance to savor in every single sentence." - Katherine Heiny

"One of the funniest debut novels I've had the good fortune to read." - Kevin Kwan

"Emily's Culliton's Brooklyn family drama-cum-mystery offers up a female heroine for whom money speaks louder than motherhood. If it's shocking, it's also refreshing." - Lucinda Rosenfeld


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