Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jul 2022
448 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
An adrenaline-fueled story of lives upended and transformed by an unprecedented catastrophe.
To all appearances, the Larsen-Hall family has everything: healthy children, a stable marriage, a lucrative career for Brantley, and the means for Daphne to pursue her art full-time. Their deluxe new Miami life has just clicked into place when Luna—the world's first category 6 hurricane—upends everything they have taken for granted.
When the storm makes landfall, it triggers a descent of another sort. Their home destroyed, two of its members missing, and finances abruptly cut off, the family finds everything they assumed about their lives now up for grabs. Swept into a mass rush of evacuees from across the American South, they are transported hundreds of miles to a FEMA megashelter where their new community includes an insurance-agent-turned-drug dealer, a group of vulnerable children, and a dedicated relief worker trying to keep the peace. Will "normal" ever return?
A suspenseful read plotted on a vast national tapestry, The Displacements thrillingly explores what happens when privilege is lost and resilience is tested in a swiftly changing world.
"Brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly believable. Seems destined to be a blockbuster." - Kirkus Review (starred review)
"Holsinger does a good job exploring the country's cultural and economic divisions and the effects of climate change, and is even better with the characters and their ever-mounting problems. This story of displacement and desperation packs a wallop." - Publishers Weekly
"A riveting and humbling reminder of how precarious our lives are in comparison to the power of nature, and a profound glimpse into our near future." - Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes
"Realistic and immediate, it puts the reader right in the eye of the emotional storm, alongside its characters. As much as this is a wake-up call about the unpredictable nature of weather and life, it is most powerfully a propulsive family drama and a provocative story of human dignity, human indignity, and the deeper meanings of home." - Miranda Cowley Heller, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Paper Palace
"Bruce Holsinger has written a novel that succeeds in confronting the shocking realities of these times without being either apocalyptic or pessimistic. The Displacements is an urgent, powerful, unputdownable novel, filled with characters that are so vividly drawn that it is impossible not to care about them. A remarkable achievement." - Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
This information about The Displacements 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.
Bruce Holsinger is a novelist and literary scholar based in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of the USA Today and Los Angeles Times-bestselling novel The Gifted School (Riverhead Books, 2019). A Book of the Month Club main selection, the novel won the Colorado Book Award and was named one of the Best Books of 2019 by NPR and numerous publications. The novel is currently in development as a TV series with NBC/Universal Television. He is also the author of A Burnable Book (2014) and The Invention of Fire (2015), award-winning historical novels published by William Morrow (HarperCollins), as well as The Displacements (2022). His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The ...
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