It All Comes Down to This

A Novel

Therese Anne Fowler

- 3.9 • 27 Ratings

- $11.99

- $11.99

A JUNE 2022 INDIE NEXT PICK

"A true page-turner." —Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful
"A smart and lively novel." —Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins
"Austenesque...this goes down as easily as an Aperol spritz." —Publishers Weekly

With her keen eye for human foibles and emotional truth, humor and deep feeling, acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Therese Anne Fowler delivers a stylish, insightful take on the dysfunctional family dramedy.

Meet the Geller sisters: Beck, Claire, and Sophie, a trio of strong-minded women whose pragmatic mother, Marti, will be dying soon.

Beck, the eldest, is a freelance journalist whose marriage has long been devoid of passion, and she's recently begun to suspect that her husband, Paul, is hiding something from her. Though middle sister Claire is an accomplished pediatric cardiologist, her own heart is a mess, and her unrequited love for the wrong man is slowly destroying her. And while Sophie, the youngest, appears to have an Instagram-ready life of glamorous work and travel, her true existence is a cash-strapped house of cards that may fall at any moment.

But Marti’s will surprises them with its provision that the family’s summer cottage in Maine must be sold, the proceeds split equally between the three sisters. While there’s a ready buyer in C.J. Reynolds, he’s an ex-con with a complicated past and a tangled history with one of the women.

Choices and consequences, mistakes and misapprehensions, obligations and desires: before long, everyone in this cast of indelible characters will have to come to terms with the ways their lives have turned out differently than they expected, as well as the secrets they’ve been keeping from each other––and themselves.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY APR 25, 2022

Fowler (The Good Neighborhood) returns with a smooth Austenesque tale of midlife reckoning. Matriarch Marti Geller, faced with terminal cancer, worries about her daughters. "That is what wills are for," Fowler writes, "to pull the strings you weren't able to... in life." The oldest, Beck, a freelance writer, is stuck in a sexless marriage. Claire, a cardiologist, is recently divorced and pining for a man she shouldn't be. Sophie, an art curator, is Instagram famous, but drowning in debt. Upon Marti's death, the girls are left with instructions to gather one last time at the family summer home off the coast of Maine before selling it and splitting the proceeds. In chapters from alternating points of view, Fowler skillfully captures each woman's contemporary narrative and backstory without losing the thread of time and place even as the book hopscotches through flashbacks and locales ranging from Mount Desert Island to Duluth and Dubai. At times she relies on too convenient coincidences to move the plot and the random insertions of an omniscient narrator to explain things, but the well-developed character studies keep the reader chugging along until the satisfying conclusion. Neither too complex nor too light, this goes down as easily as an Aperol spritz.

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