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Following the death of her worthy liberal parents, Corlis McCrea moves back into her family's grand Reconstruction mansion in North Carolina, willed to all three siblings. Her timid younger brother has never left home. When her bullying black-sheep older brother moves into "his" house as well, it's war.
Each heir wants the house. Yet to buy the other out, two siblings must team against one. Just as in girlhood, Corlis is torn between allying with the decent but fearful youngest and the iconoclastic eldest, who covets his legacy to destroy it. A Perfectly Good Family is a stunning examination of inheritance, literal and psychological: what we take from our parents, what we discard, and what we are stuck with, like it or not.
Lionel Shriver
LIONEL SHRIVER’S novels include the National Book Award finalist So Much for That, the Sunday Times bestseller The Mandibles, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, winner of the Orange Prize. A regular on multiple podcasts, she’s written fortnightly columns for the Spectator since 2017. Her journalism has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, The Times, UnHerd, the FT, The Free Press, Spiked Online and many other media outlets.
She lives in Portugal and Brooklyn, New York.
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