Tumbledown

A winning ensemble cast of therapists and patients make stabs at sanity in Robert Boswell's mordantly funny novel Tumbledown. -Vanity FairA complicated, nuanced look at human experience and the insights into that experience contributed by people of varying kinds of intelligence. -The Washington Post A moving and often darkly hilarious meditation on sanity. -Houston Chronicle A deft twining of irony and insight on nearly every page . . . Tumbledown wryly mines the heartache in emotional disturbances, some present from birth and the rest brought on by the business of living. -The New York Times Within a suspenseful plot spiked with love triangles and flashbacks, Boswell renders each complex psyche and scene with magnificent precision and penetrating vision, fine-tuning our definitions of disorder and healing and deepening our perception of what it is to be normal, what it is to be human. -Booklist (starred review)Like a funnier One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, this story focuses on a therapist and his wild yet well-meaning patients, bumbling through life, trying to make sense of the world and one another. -O, The Oprah Magazine, Ten Titles to Pick Up NowBoswell can write the most refreshingly old-fashioned kind of narrative: one that evokes deep sympathy for all its characters . . . All the novel's characters know that in adulthood they're supposed to settle for 'what could pass for a normal life. Maybe it was a C- sort of life, but that was a passing grade.' Still, they want to keep hope, wonder and love in their lives . . . Without a whiff of sentimentality, he shows exactly how elusive such balance can be. -The New York Times Book Review