Events

  Murder – lust – food – sports – greed - family – love: don’t miss this book!  It would be difficult to start a new year of fiction reading with a better book than this wild, mesmerizing, unusual, gloriously written, thrilling, and unforgettable train ride Bill Roorbach’s concocted in Life Among Giants.   At seventeen, David “Lizard” Hochmeyer is nearly seven feet tall, a star quarterback, and Princeton-bound. His future seems all but assured until his parents are mysteriously murdered, leaving Lizard and his older sister, Kate, adrift and alone. Sylphide, the world’s greatest ballerina, lives across the pond from their Connecticut home, in a mansion the size of a museum, and it turns out that her rock star husband’s own disasters have intersected with Lizard’s—and Kate’s—in the most intimate and surprising ways.   Over the decades that follow, Lizard and Kate are obsessed with uncovering the motives behind the deaths, returning time and again to their father’s missing briefcase, his shady business dealings and shaky finances, and to Sylphide, who has threaded her way into Lizard’s and Kate’s lives much more deeply than either had ever realized.  “Replete with all the stuff of great page-turning pleasure: violent murder, illicit love, mysterious family history. A story of extraordinary characters at the mercy of universal passions and disappointments. A giant success.” -- Antonya Nelson, author of Bound    A wildly entertaining novel of murder, seduction, and revenge -- rich in incident, in expansiveness of character, and in lavishness of setting -- it’s a Gatsby-esque adventure, a larger-than-life quest for answers that reveals how sometimes the greatest mystery lies in knowing one’s own heart.    Bill Roorbach is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories Into Memoirs, Ideas Into Essays, and Life Into Literature, Big Bend, and The Smallest Color. His work has been published in Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, New York, and dozens of other magazines and journals.