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A Novel
by Claire Carusillo
Geek Love meets Sam Lipsyte in this rollicking, hilarious debut novel about a family of unforgettable women obsessed with securing their legacy.
Claire grew up with the legend of the Unsinkable Mounsey Women. Her great-great-grandmother Fanny made headlines in 1915 for washing ashore in England nearly a year after her ship sank. Fanny's daughter Sarah went to collect her mother on the equally ill-fated Lusitania―whose sinking she, too, survived. Their improbable endurance led to regional stardom on the Midwestern vaudeville circuit. But Claire never knew the full story―until now.
Listless, jobless, and recently canceled for extolling skin-care advice online that sent a reader to the hospital, Claire is surprised when a knock at the door turns out to be the police, looking for answers about a murder from the 1970s they suspect her mother, Kath, may know something about. As the cops zero in, Claire demands answers from her mother.
Kath's comically long response, which blossoms into the story of the Mounseys and their descendants writ large, moves from a Liverpudlian poorhouse at the onset of World War I to a Lake Michigan lighthouse in 1971 (when sex was freer and McDonald's fried their potatoes with beef tallow) to present-day Chicagoland; along the way, it offers Claire a richer understanding of what she inherited from the complicated, resilient women she descends from.
Replete with inappropriately old boyfriends, dubious medical professionals, and more than a few boats, The Responsible Party is the story of several women, in several different timelines, trying to stay afloat.
"Carusillo juggles the many plot threads with aplomb and proves to be a consummate prose stylist. This one has energy and ambition to spare." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Gripping and funny, Carusillo unravels mysteries long buried with precise pacing and dialogue. This is a Hollywood-ready story—a complete knockout." —Debutiful, Most Anticipated Books of 2026
This information about The Responsible Party 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.
Claire Carusillo is a writer from Illinois. She now lives in Midway, Utah, where she is the co-owner of the forthcoming Storyboard, a bookstore, a skate shop, and coffee bar. She has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where she was a teaching fellow. Her writing has appeared all over the internet, including in Gawker, New York Magazine, Elle, and her newsletter That Wet Look.
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