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Published Mar 2011
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
There seems to be no shortage of business at the Tank, a high-profile firm in Copenhagen. There are meetings to attend, memos to write, colleagues to undermine. But when the Tank's nefarious CEO announces a round of downsizing, everyone becomes exponentially more concerned about...whatever it is they're doing. Not since Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End has there been such a savvy satire of contemporary work culture, and the distorting effects it can have on our lives.
Following these imperiled company men and women out into the autumn days and nights of Copenhagen, Thomas E. Kennedy traces the ripple effects of the news at the Tank as it impacts spouses, children, and lovers. Top executive Frederick Breathwaite is frantically trying to ensure a stable future for his son, while the boy's greatest fear is that his future might resemble his father's absurd present. Harald Jaeger is estranged from his wife and daughters but pursuing desperate passions for other women (including the Tank's married CFO). And while he's lost in amorous fantasies, he has managed to catch the CEO's eye - as a possible replacement for Breathwaite.
Sharp, funny, but remarkably tender, Falling Sideways is the second book in Kennedy's virtuoso Copenhagen Quartet, and a book that will continue to build his reputation as one of America's most versatile literary novelists.
"A clever spoof about work and the relationships formed there." - Kirkus Reviews
"...his generational conflicts are familiar and his skein of thin story lines seems like a lot of too little." - Publishers Weekly
"Thomas E. Kennedy is an astonishment." - Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
"[Kennedy] is a writer to be reckoned with." - Washington Post
"No one writes about the loves and lives of men better than Kennedy." - Kansas City Star
This information about Falling Sideways 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.
Thomas E. Kennedy's books include novels, story and essay collections, literary criticism, translation, and anthologies. His essays won a National Magazine Award in 2008, and his fiction has been awarded several other prizes. He teaches at the Fairleigh Dickinson University MFA program. Born and raised in New York, Kennedy currently lives in Copenhagen with his two children.
His Copenhagen Quartet comprises four independent novels about the souls and seasons, the light and jazz and serving houses of the Danish capital. The US publisher has chosen to publish these stand-alone books in a different sequence to their publication order in Europe - starting with the third volume in the quartet, Greene's Summer but with a different title; and following with the fourth.
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