Snapshots: Summary and book reviews of Snapshots by William Norris, plus links to an excerpt from Snapshots and a biography of William Norris.

Snapshots engages our endless fascination with what goes on behind other people's closed doors. It's that particularly American brand of literature that puts the ideal middle-class suburban family under a microscope and exposes the heartaches, fears, and secrets not visible to the naked eye. William Norris's first novel is a portrait of the Mahoneys as they appear in 1997, then working back through twenty-five years, filling in the rich, deep hues of the life that has shaped their relationships. And in the shadows of alcoholism, homosexuality, and mental illness, the Mahoneys love and hate one another, save one another, and break one another's hearts. Norris lays bare the secrets that mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters keep from themselves and each other, and ultimately tells a hopeful story about the bonds of flesh and blood and shared experience. A story about the real, hard-won joy of family.

Media Reviews

Publishers Weekly Norris renders anecdotes of family conflict and nurturing some trivial, others tragic with energy and compassion ... the collective portrait of a changing family unit has complexity and validity. Katharine Weber, author of The Music Lesson Snapshots is a vivid family portrait, illuminating as it does the strange and complex relationship between past and present. William Norris has a wonderful gift for capturing those ordinary gestures which, like snapshots in a family album, retrospectively emerge as significant and telling in the lives of engaging and authentic characters. An auspicious debut.

Recent Reader Reviews

Review (not rated) by Anonymous
Andrew
Snapshots tells the story of the Mahoneys, a
contemporary Irish-Catholic family from suburban New
Jersey. First time novelist William Norris draws a
convincing portrait of a nuclear family, one that will
especially...   Read More

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