Heroic Measures by Jill Ciment
Photo: Charlotte Jenks Lewis/Studio D
The free offer to download Jill Ciment's irresistable new novel, Heroic Measures has expired, but you can start reading the first chapter of the book today.
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O, The Oprah Magazine says:
After a lifetime together, 70-something Alex and his wife, Ruth, are still smitten—with each other ("He has loved her for so long that he can no longer distinguish between passion and familiarity") and with their elderly dachshund, Dorothy. About to sell their Manhattan walk-up, the couple is caught up in crisis: Their dog is suddenly paralyzed, a truck jackknifes in a tunnel, news channels click into terrorist-hype overdrive. Read Jill Ciment's Heroic Measures (Pantheon) for its painterly depictions of a rattled city, its deliciously biting satire of media and real estate madness, its tender knowledge of the creaturely ties that bind. Read more about the book
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This book is one of O's 25 Books of Summer. Get the complete summer reading list, plus:
About the Book: From the author of The Tattoo Artist ("Beautifully written"-Alice Sebold; "Boldly conceived" — The New York Times Book Review), a new novel-taut, moving, accomplished-set in a fraught, post-9/11 New York... about real estate, dog love, and a city on alert.
A gasoline tanker truck is "stuck" in the Midtown Tunnel. New Yorkers are panicked . . . . Is this the next big attack?
Alex, an artist, and Ruth, a former schoolteacher with an FBI file as thick as a dictionary, must get their beloved dachshund, whose back legs have suddenly become paralyzed, to the animal hospital sixty blocks north. But the streets of Manhattan are welded with traffic. Their dog, Dorothy, twelve-years-old and gray-faced, is the emotional center of Alex and Ruth's forty-five-year-long childless marriage. Using a cutting board as a stretcher, they ferry the dog uptown.
This is also the weekend that Alex and Ruth must sell their apartment. While house hunters traipse through it during their open house, husband and wife wait by the phone to hear from the animal hospital. During the course of forty-eight hours, as the missing truck driver terrorizes the city, the price of their apartment becomes a barometer for collective hope and despair, as the real estate market spikes and troughs with every breaking news story.
In shifting points of view—Alex's, Ruth's, and the little dog's—man, woman, and one small tenaciousbeast try to make sense of the cacophony of rumors, opinions, and innuendos coming from news anchors, cable TV pundits, pollsters, bomb experts, hostages, witnesses, real estate agents, house hunters, bargain seekers, howling dogs, veterinarians, nurses, and cab drivers.
A moving, deftly told novel of ultrahigh-urban anxiety.
This book is one of the 25 Books of Summer
Get the complete list
A gasoline tanker truck is "stuck" in the Midtown Tunnel. New Yorkers are panicked . . . . Is this the next big attack?
Alex, an artist, and Ruth, a former schoolteacher with an FBI file as thick as a dictionary, must get their beloved dachshund, whose back legs have suddenly become paralyzed, to the animal hospital sixty blocks north. But the streets of Manhattan are welded with traffic. Their dog, Dorothy, twelve-years-old and gray-faced, is the emotional center of Alex and Ruth's forty-five-year-long childless marriage. Using a cutting board as a stretcher, they ferry the dog uptown.
This is also the weekend that Alex and Ruth must sell their apartment. While house hunters traipse through it during their open house, husband and wife wait by the phone to hear from the animal hospital. During the course of forty-eight hours, as the missing truck driver terrorizes the city, the price of their apartment becomes a barometer for collective hope and despair, as the real estate market spikes and troughs with every breaking news story.
In shifting points of view—Alex's, Ruth's, and the little dog's—man, woman, and one small tenaciousbeast try to make sense of the cacophony of rumors, opinions, and innuendos coming from news anchors, cable TV pundits, pollsters, bomb experts, hostages, witnesses, real estate agents, house hunters, bargain seekers, howling dogs, veterinarians, nurses, and cab drivers.
A moving, deftly told novel of ultrahigh-urban anxiety.
This book is one of the 25 Books of SummerGet the complete list
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