The Good Parents: Book summary and reviews of The Good Parents by Joan London

The Good Parents

by Joan London

The Good Parents by Joan London X
The Good Parents by Joan London
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  • Published Feb 2009
    368 pages
    Genre: Literary Fiction

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Book Summary

Paperback Original.

A two-time winner of Australia’s prestigious The Age Book of the Year Award, Joan London’s debut novel, Gilgamesh, was published to rapturous acclaim both in her native Australia and in the United States. Now, London has delivered The Good Parents, a tender and compelling tale of mother love and the harrowing moment when a daughter spreads her wings and vanishes from her parents’ orbit.

Maya de Jong is an eighteen-year-old country girl who moves to Melbourne and begins an affair with her new boss. When Maya’s parents, Toni and Jacob, arrive for a visit, Maya is gone—no one knows where. Maya, for reasons of her own, leaves haunting clues in late-night calls to her brother at home, carefully avoiding detection by the two people who love her most. Ultimately, to find her daughter Toni will have to revisit a part of her past that she thought she had shut off forever—the closest she ever came to being a lost girl herself.

The Good Parents is at once utterly contemporary and a story as old as humanity itself: a stunning portrait of familial love and how far we can drift apart in the moments between the words we speak.

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Media Reviews

"This insightful novel illuminates with seeming ease the fraught relationships among friends, families and entire communities." - Publishers Weekly.

"London's narrative is deft, transcending a typical family saga and poignantly illuminating not only the harsh truths but also the gentle nobility of her characters' lives. Absorbing and suspenseful ..." - Library Journal.

This information about The Good Parents 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.

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