A goop book club selection • Amazon Editors' Choice
“This unsparing and absorbing family portrait broke my heart and remade it a hundred times over.” —Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin
It is the day of her brother’s wedding and our narrator is still struggling with her toast. Despite a recent fracture between them, her brother, Danny, has asked her to give a speech and she doesn’t know where to begin, how to put words to their kind of love. She was nine years old when she traveled with her parents to Thailand to meet her brother, six years her junior. They grew up together like any other siblings, and shared a bucolic childhood in Northern California. Yet when she holds their story up to the light, it refracts in ways she doesn’t expect.
What follows is a heartfelt letter addressed to Danny and an attempt at a full accounting of their years growing up, invoking everything from the classic Victorian adoption plot to childless women in literature to documents from Danny’s case file. It’s also a confession of sorts to the parts of her life that she has kept from him, including her own struggle with infertility. And as the hours until the wedding wane, she uncovers the words that can’t and won’t be said aloud.
In Immediate Family, a tender and fierce debut novel, Ashley Nelson Levy explores the enduring bond between two siblings and the complexities of motherhood, infertility, race, and the many definitions of family.
Genre: Literary Fiction
“This unsparing and absorbing family portrait broke my heart and remade it a hundred times over.” —Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin
It is the day of her brother’s wedding and our narrator is still struggling with her toast. Despite a recent fracture between them, her brother, Danny, has asked her to give a speech and she doesn’t know where to begin, how to put words to their kind of love. She was nine years old when she traveled with her parents to Thailand to meet her brother, six years her junior. They grew up together like any other siblings, and shared a bucolic childhood in Northern California. Yet when she holds their story up to the light, it refracts in ways she doesn’t expect.
What follows is a heartfelt letter addressed to Danny and an attempt at a full accounting of their years growing up, invoking everything from the classic Victorian adoption plot to childless women in literature to documents from Danny’s case file. It’s also a confession of sorts to the parts of her life that she has kept from him, including her own struggle with infertility. And as the hours until the wedding wane, she uncovers the words that can’t and won’t be said aloud.
In Immediate Family, a tender and fierce debut novel, Ashley Nelson Levy explores the enduring bond between two siblings and the complexities of motherhood, infertility, race, and the many definitions of family.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"This gorgeous debut opens with a request: the narrator's younger brother, Danny, has asked her to give a speech at his wedding. From there, the story unspools into an elegant, intellectual, and heartrending examination of the bonds and silence of a family complexly expanded-and completed-by Danny's transracial adoption. A stirring novel by a writer with uncanny insight and sensitivity, Immediate Family asks urgent questions about belonging, what makes a family, and the horizons of love. It moved me deeply." - Julie Buntin
"This unsparing and absorbing family portrait broke my heart and remade it a hundred times over. In prose that is distilled, astute, and precise, Immediate Family covers the territory of life that words are often insufficient for, those challenges that are at once isolating and universal-waiting, the imperfect love that binds a family, what you choose and what is chosen for you." - Rachel Khong
"I've never read a love story like Immediate Family before-complex, challenging, sensitively and beautifully told. This is a gorgeous, affecting novel that probes the fissures and hidden places of familial love-and all its provocations and possibilities-and in so doing gets to the heart of love itself." - Lydia Kiesling
"For all the orphans populating the pages of contemporary fiction, there are vanishingly few novels that honestly explore the complexities of adoption in modern America. Those of us whose immediate families are formed by this process will read Ashley Nelson Levy’s novel with recognition and revelation: it plumbs the ethical ambiguities, surveys the fault lines of race and privilege, creates space for the uncertainties and obligations so often written out. Composed with emotional candor and intellectual clarity, Immediate Family is about the improbable relentlessness of love. It's a testament to the reality that no family, regardless of origin or composition, is ever fully formed: most days the best we can do is keep each other from coming undone. It's a book that refuses tidy conclusions, and yet by the time I turned the last page, this book that had undone me had also left me magnificently whole." - Anthony Marra
"This unsparing and absorbing family portrait broke my heart and remade it a hundred times over. In prose that is distilled, astute, and precise, Immediate Family covers the territory of life that words are often insufficient for, those challenges that are at once isolating and universal-waiting, the imperfect love that binds a family, what you choose and what is chosen for you." - Rachel Khong
"I've never read a love story like Immediate Family before-complex, challenging, sensitively and beautifully told. This is a gorgeous, affecting novel that probes the fissures and hidden places of familial love-and all its provocations and possibilities-and in so doing gets to the heart of love itself." - Lydia Kiesling
"For all the orphans populating the pages of contemporary fiction, there are vanishingly few novels that honestly explore the complexities of adoption in modern America. Those of us whose immediate families are formed by this process will read Ashley Nelson Levy’s novel with recognition and revelation: it plumbs the ethical ambiguities, surveys the fault lines of race and privilege, creates space for the uncertainties and obligations so often written out. Composed with emotional candor and intellectual clarity, Immediate Family is about the improbable relentlessness of love. It's a testament to the reality that no family, regardless of origin or composition, is ever fully formed: most days the best we can do is keep each other from coming undone. It's a book that refuses tidy conclusions, and yet by the time I turned the last page, this book that had undone me had also left me magnificently whole." - Anthony Marra
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