The Family Clause
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
'A bold and remarkable novel...full of heart and compassion' Dinaw Mengestu
A bad-tempered grandfather, now living abroad, is back in Stockholm to see his adult children. The son is a failure, the daughter is having a baby with the wrong man, and their mother is a heartless deserter. Only he, the patriarch, is perfect - according to himself, at least. Over ten intense days, the strained relationships of this chaotic but entirely normal family unfold, and painful memories begin to resurface. Something has to give. But the son is duty-bound to his father by a murky, years-old agreement - can it be renegotiated, or will it bind everyone to the past for ever?
'The dynamics of each relationship are superbly complex, and Khemiri's wry, comic touch gives a lightness to the inevitability as the children follow in their father's footsteps' Guardian
'Excellent...the complex portrait of a family that is both identifiable and distinctive, normal and strange' TLS
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Khemiri (Everything I Don't Remember) repeats phrases, assembles lists, and stacks up a family's disappointments in this surprisingly satisfying novel set over the course of a single week. A man, referred to as "a son who is a father," threatens to revoke the Father Clause, a family agreement allowing his "father who is a grandfather" to stay in the small family-owned apartment in Stockholm whenever he is in town. The father is too critical of his son, too stingy, and too messy, and his overburdened son doesn't want him there he has bigger problems. His girlfriend, the mother of their children, has gone back to work as a lawyer, leaving him to care for their two needy children as his self-esteem dips into the red. The father is less demanding of his daughter, the man's sister, but he doesn't know about her personal struggles, such as the fact that she's pregnant and her boyfriend disagrees with her decision to have an abortion. The novel's wordiness and gymnastically vague details will likely wear on readers, but Khemiri succeeds at creating an infectious sense of melancholia as the poisonous patriarch is forced to reckon with the truth. In a slow build of quotidian moments, Khemiri constructs a familiarly flawed universe that lays bare what it means to be human.
