Love All: A Novel
After his wife, Joanie, dies in her sleep, Bob goes to live with his daughter, Anne, and her family. Anne, an overworked lawyer, and her husband, Hugh, the headmaster of a private preschool, are drifting apart. Their teenage children, Teddy and Julia, are dealing with routine adolescent problems. Teddy has no sense of direction, while Julia wants nothing more than to turn the attention of her best (boy) friend into a romance. Hanging over the family is the specter of a scandalous book from the 1960s called The Sex Cure, a Peyton Place–type potboiler that revealed town secrets and left many marriages broken in its wake. Although Bob was relieved that his many affairs never made it into print, Joanie became obsessed with the book, and observant Anne was left to spend the rest of her life questioning the notions of fidelity and trust. When Hugh has an affair with a student’s mother, it threatens to bring down the entire family. A quiet snapshot of an average family, Wright’s debut novel should appeal to fans of domestic fiction. --Rebecca Vnuk