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A wry, tender novel about an ordinary family facing extraordinary choices.
Julia Alden has fallen deeply, unexpectedly in love. American obstetrician James is everything she didn't know she wantedb-bif only her teenage daughter, Gwen, didn't hate him so much. Uniting two households is never easy, but when Gwen turns for comfort to James's seventeen-year-old son, Nathan, the consequences will test her mother's loyalty and threaten all their fragile new happiness.
This is a moving and powerful novel about the modern family: about starting over; about love, guilt, and generosity; about building something beautiful amid the mess and complexity of what came before. It is a story about standing by the ones we love, even while they make mistakes. We would give anything to make our children happy. But how much should they ask?
"Starred Review. In finely wrought prose, with characters who seem to walk beside us and speak aloud, Segal's latest novel is a sympathetic portrait of the difficulties in finding love and raising teenagers." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Prize-winning author Segal (The Innocents) offers no easy answers in this compassionate novel that surprises until the very end." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. Readers who enjoyed Holly Chamberlin's The Season of Us (2016) and the works of Meg Wolitzer and Matthew Norman will adore this frank and unfiltered glimpse inside one family's struggles and successes." - Booklist
"If adolescence is "fraught with awkwardness," Segal ably demonstrates that adulthood is as well." - Publishers Weekly
This information about The Awkward Age 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.
Francesca Segal is an award-winning writer and journalist. Her first novel, The Innocents, won the Costa First Novel Award, the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the Sami Rohr Prize, and a Betty Trask Award, and was long-listed for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize).
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