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by Nick Fuller Googins
A heartbreaking American epic about three sisters who unearth lifetimes of family tensions as they are forced to rescue one of their own from peril, testing the limits of sacrifice, sisterhood, and forgiveness from the author of the "profound work of great wisdom" (Alice Elliott Dark) The Great Transition.
Josie may be the youngest sister, but she takes care of everyone. She is the left-brained scientist to her twin sisters' right-brained artistic chaos. She makes sure their rent gets paid on time, they make their therapy appointments, and has also been their de-facto band manager since she was a teenager. When Ara, her middle sister (by a few minutes), calls from jail, it isn't exactly a surprise, and Josie knows exactly how to snap into action.
Emma is the quintessential frontwoman, complete with looks and attitude. But the success of The Twins' first (and only) album—gold records, Grammy nominations, and diehard fans—is two decades behind her. Hiding under the surface of her swagger is a long-held guilt that has turned her into her sister's enabler. Emma knows she needs Ara's creative genius and thinks a jailhouse record could be just the thing to get Ara her freedom and their band back on the main stage.
Ara is detoxing, not only from her opioid habit but also from her family. The truth is, as crazy as it sounds, she's not in a hurry to get out of lock-up. In the most unlikely and dangerous of places, this could be her chance to face the demons of her past and disentangle herself from her family.
Bertie, who raised her three daughters as a single mother, has always taught them that family won't always be around to take care of you. A former defense attorney and perennial do-gooder, she's committed to taking care of everyone less fortunate even if that means putting her girls' needs second. But now Bertie must decide if she should reenter her daughters' lives in their greatest time of need—or watch to see if the resilience she's taught them will help carry them through.
A story both intimate and sweeping, The Frequency of Living Things explores the timeless question of how our individual destinies are intertwined with our family, our siblings, and our history no matter how we try to untangle ourselves from them.
"The beauty and the tragedy of Fuller Googins' second book is how all of the characters try to reach the same frequencies and how they fail and then try again...At once harrowing and gorgeous, The Frequency of Living Things will leave the reader stunned and touched." —Booklist (starred review)
"A painful, but also drolly original, excavation of family trauma through the perspectives of three sisters and their old-school activist mother." —Kirkus Reviews
"[This] emotionally resonant family saga celebrates the potent bonds between mothers, daughters and sisters." —The Washington Post
"[A] stirring family epic." —Harper's Bazaar
"The Frequency of Living Things is a masterfully written family saga, an ode to how our mothers, daughters and sisters often understand us better than we do ourselves. I would gladly spend forever with the fiercely loving, bitingly tender Tayloe sisters and their complicated, heroic mother. Heartbreaking yet filled with hope, Googins's sophomore novel cements him as one of our greatest contemporary novelists." —Cat Shook, author of If We're Being Honest
This information about The Frequency of Living Things 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.
Nick Fuller Googins has published short stories and essays in The Paris Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine and works as an elementary school teacher. He is the author of The Great Transition and The Frequency of Living Things.
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