About the Book

A fame-hungry novelist, his cast-aside former wife, and their sexually experimenting daughter find themselves further tested by an unexpected shared encounter with the past.

Book Synopsis

Adam Weller is a moderately successful novelist, past his prime, but squiring around a much younger woman and still longing for greater fame and glory. His former wife, Eleanor, is unhappily playing the role of the overweight, discarded woman. Their daughter Maud has just begun a frankly sexual affair that unexpectedly becomes life-changing. Into each of these lives the past intrudes in a way that will test them to their core. With perfect pitch and a rare empathy, Brian Morton is equally adept at portraying the life of the mind and how it plays out in the world, brilliantly tracing the border between honor and violation. Here Morton tells his strongest story yet--a story about love, friendship, literary treachery, and what each of us owes to the past.

From the Back Cover

Remarkable . . . Morton] conjures up lives so vivid the reader mourns their passing. The New York Times Book Review
In this heartbreakingly beautiful novel, Brian Morton gives us four complicated, passionate people whose lives are tested by tragedy.Breakable You is the story of Maud, a brilliant but fragile graduate student; her father, Adam, a novelist hungry for greater fame; Eleanor, his former wife, a psychologist struggling to reinvent herself in middle age; and Maud s new lover, Samir, an Arab American intellectual in mourning for his lost daughter.A novel that is both clear-eyed and deeply compassionate, Breakable You examines what we do when life gives us more than we think we can bear.
"A literary theft, a death and the sparking of desire make for a tumultuous year in the lives of four New Yorkers fumbling toward belated self-discovery . . . In this polished, affecting novel, their stories intertwine and uplift: As Maud, the book's tender heart, reflects, striving is 'the law of life.'" People

"Morton is the rare writer equally invested in people and ideas . . . [He] creates some of the most complex and real female characters of any writer."--San Francisco Chronicle
BRIAN MORTON is the author of three previous novels, including Starting Out in the Evening, which won the Koret Jewish Book Award and was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award, and A Window Across the River, which was a Today Book Club selection. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University and lives in New York.Reading Group Guide available at www.HarcourtBooks.com."

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR BRIAN MORTON "For some readers, Brian Morton may still be an undiscovered treasure. He won't be for long." - Newsday

"The passion of Morton's characters ring true . . . because the romantic ones conflict with such things as professional ambition and jealously." -Chicago Tribune