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Published May 2015
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Hannah was the kind of woman who turned heads. Tall and graceful, naturally pretty, often impulsive, always spirited, the upper-class girl who picked, of all men, Lovell - the introverted climate scientist, the practical one who thought he could change the world if he could just get everyone to listen to reason. After a magical honeymoon they settled in the suburbs to raise their two children.
But over the years, Lovell and Hannah's conversations have become charged with resentments and unspoken desires. She's become withdrawn and directionless. His work affords him a convenient distraction. The children can sense the tension, which they've learned to mostly ignore. Until, after one explosive argument, Hannah vanishes. And Lovell, for the first time, is forced to examine the trajectory of his marriage through the lens of memory - and the eyes of his children. As he tries to piece together what happened to his wife - and to their lives together - readers follow Hannah through that single day when the smallest of decisions takes her to places she never intended to go.
With the intensity of The Lovely Bones, the balance of wit and heartbreak of The Descendants, and the emotional acuity of Anne Tyler's work, The Daylight Marriage is at its heart a novel about what happens when our intuitions override our logic, with a page-turning plot that doesn't reveal its secrets until the very end.
"Starred Review. Pitlor brings forth the emotions that surge beneath the surface with the precision and power of a conductor ... This powerful analysis of how dreams become nightmares will make readers want to hold their loved ones close." - Booklist
"A technically accomplished but largely downbeat tale of miserable people learning life lessons late. " - Kirkus
"...a novel that is fast-moving, emotionally complex, and ultimately heartbreaking." - Tom Perrotta
"Hypnotically readable - I absolutely couldn't put it down. The structure is brilliant, and I turned the pages with increasing dread. This book is terrific." - Stephen King
This information about The Daylight Marriage was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Heidi Pitlor grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and got her BA at McGill University and her MFA at Emerson College in Boston. She was a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for nine years before she became the series editor of The Best American Short Stories. She has worked with Salman Rushdie, Alice Sebold, Richard Russo, Elizabeth Strout, and others. She is the author of the novel The Birthdays and her fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, the Huffington Post, and Labor Day: True Stories by Today's Best Women Writers. In Fall 2015, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, which she coedited with Lorrie Moore. Heidi lives outside Boston with her husband and twin son and daughter.
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